NYT feels bad for Paris Hilton

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/27/weekinreview/27paris.html?

Some Sympathy for Paris Hilton
POOR Paris Hilton!
As unlikely as the preceding sentence might seem, there is ample reason to pity Ms. Hilton, the heiress, reality-TV actress, product pitchwoman and accidental porn starlet.

Ms. Hilton just can't seem to get a break in the digital age. She suffered embarrassment back in 2003 when a homemade sex tape hit the Internet, and now her Sidekick - a high-tech toy that combines phone, organizer and camera and also lets users send e-mail and instant messages - has been hacked. Its contents, like her movie, were posted to the Internet for any and all to enjoy.

"She was pretty upset about it," someone told MSNBC. "It's one thing to have people looking at your sex tapes, but having people reading your personal e-mails is a real invasion of privacy."

You know for a quote that good, you really should have something better than “someone told MSNBC”. However, I don’t know which is sadder….that someone thinks emails are more a private act than sex or that having your unapproved sex tape mass distributed is not that big a deal.


While the piece mostly focuses on the ChoicePoint scandal, it did have this presumably unintentional gaff. This picture with
this caption underneath ”A T-shirt expresses the plight of the socialite's friends.” Yeah, her friends are going to be the one’s buying this rather than hipsters looking to be trendy/faux ironic by pretending they are friends of Paris. Probably next week there will be a piece stating that truckers hats are a sign of a new shift by young people towards working class values.

And is it just my suspicious nature, but does anyone else think that Fred Durst “sidekick” (which can't film movies…it can only take still photos) sex tape was probably released by Fred Durst himself in order to get some ink? Feel free to make your own 'I did it for the nookie' joke.

Marriage proposal via Video Game

http://gc.advancedmn.com/article.php?artid=4311

AMN: You recently proposed to your fiancé' in a rather interesting manner. Can you please describe to our reader's how you did so?
Adam: I had been wanting to propose to my girlfriend for a while, but couldn't think up an original way to do it. One day I was thinking and it just popped in my head that I could do it through Animal Crossing's letter sending system. Sara absolutely loves to play Animal Crossing, along with Donkey Konga, Mario Party, and Wario Ware.

I saw this as link on another site and I'm a little suspicious of it is due to the several million plugs for Nintendo products in the copy…but I’m currently attributing that to the lo-tek approach of the ‘media’ firm behind the site. Although it would not be the first time that Nintendo's viral marketing went a bit too far...a job posting they put on Moster.com for a Bounty Hunter actually got responses from quite a few non- bright mercenary types.

Bounty Hunter' Job Posting Generates Surprising Response

Nintendo is no stranger to viral marketing, having dabbled in it during the N64 days with Perfect Dark and Majora's Mask, but the marketing technique has recently had a spotlight cast on it thanks to Microsoft's well-publicized ilovebees campaign for Halo 2. Nintendo, not to be outdone, orchestrated their own viral campaign for Metroid Prime 2 that spanned multiple websites for fictional companies, blog entries, and more.

Perhaps most interesting of all was the seemingly innocuous (at the time) posting of a 'Bounty Hunter' job entry on Monster.com. Although plenty of Nintendo fans got the joke and sent in "applications" of their own, over 90 serious applicants expressed interest in the job. Yes, over 90 people submitted applications to become an intergalactic bounty hunter.

A quick glance at Nintendo's initial posting on Monster would tip off most readers that something was amiss: "Candidate must also be comfortable using high-tech (some would say alien) weaponry... Experience operating in subterranean, low-oxygen, zero-gravity or other harsh, unforgiving environments is a definite plus." The obvious tells that all was not as it seemed didn't stop the genuine applications from rolling in.

But getting back to the real story at hand....The interview is fairly fluffy but they do get down to 'brass tacks' questions like….

AMN: Do you foresee yourself continuing to play games with your fiancé in your future after marriage?

Adam: Oh yeah. Hopefully she'll get more into games and get better at them and we can play games into the Revolution and on.

AMN: Will it ever be a struggle to split playing time between you and your wife?

Adam: Hah. Well it already is with Animal Crossing. Once she starts it up she plays for about 2 hours at a time. So I sit there and watch her or just play my DS or something. She lets me do most of the playing when I want. She knows how much I'm into video games.

All I can say is that he is a very lucky man to have a woman that patient (or clueless).

As for the aftermath of love and videogames, you can read about the fallout of "who gets the saved game data from Knights of the Old Republic on our Xbox" here at breaking up is hard to do.

Happy to be here in the States

Good sized shaking near Tokyo this afternoon EST (their early morning 4AM)-19 people reported hurt due to falling household items. Tokyo is located around the dot just to below and to the left of the 'X'. Hmmm, Osaka is looking more and more interesting all the time.

Yeah, I'm a dork

I know it's dorky but I thought this was pretty funny. Solid Snake of Metal Gear Solid shows his sensitive side in his special love camouflage. Ah, but who would get the card...Meryl or May Lin?

from geek on stun

Love Hotels: A central pin of J tax base?

Ah, it's Valentines day. Always amusing to see hoards of hapless men grabbing flowers and cards at Target and other stores.

I should note that Valentines day in Japan, like many things, is different than the US. In Japan, it is a day when men get treats from women. Men return the favor on "White day", March 14, which is more like the US version of Valentines day. So in Japan, both both men and women have a day to get gifts. Another interesting tid bit...you're supposed to give small gifts to friends/co-workers people, even if you don't like them romantically. People often given small boxes of chocolates, sometimes referred as "giri choco" which means "obligation chocolates" although some say "friendship chocolates" would be a more correct translation. For more on this see this discussion on giri choco

On a related note, here are some snips from an interesting piece on Japanese love hotels and interest in them by foreign investors.
http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/news/world/10898917.htm?1c

Prospect of big profits lures foreign investors to Japan's love hotels

The hotels are no small affair for Japan, though. Numbering some 19,000, love hotels are a pillar of Japan's economy, thought to provide more tax revenue than all other industries except pachinko parlors, the noisy betting venues filled with pinball-like games.
…
Sky-high real estate prices in Japan help shed light on the abundance of love hotels. The country's 120 million people crowd together in a land the size of California. Many families live with several generations cramped under one roof. Researchers say that more than half the love-hotel clientele is married couples or young unmarried couples with nowhere to go.

"In the suburbs, married couples use the love hotels to be romantic. Since they live together with grandma and grandpa, and with their children, they don't have privacy," said Jiro Miura, a commentator from the Love Hotel Total Research Office, a consultancy.

Major Japanese banks, for the most part, see the love-hotel industry as unsavory. Other lending agencies have let foreigners tread first. Sniffing for opportunities, investors such as Mijatovic are scouting love hotels for signs of distressed ownership and tallying the couples entering each day as a way to estimate revenues.

What they say they've found is an industry any investor could cherish.

Most love hotels are mom-and-pop businesses with an average of 10 to 25 rooms, although some have as many as 80. Chains are few, usually with no more than two dozen hotels each. In general, rooms rent for two or three hours, averaging about $66 a stay. Overnight stays are possible at a higher rate.

The average love-hotel room rents two and a half times per day, Mijatovic said. For a 40-room hotel, monthly revenue can come close to $200,000, he said. Profit margins routinely run at 45 percent.
…
Some rooms don't easily fit into Western notions of romance.

Flipping through a photo album of renovated "love hotels," Sasaki comes across one room that's a shrine to the Hanshin Tigers baseball team, replete with a neon "Home run!" sign. Other theme rooms exalt Budweiser beer and the characters Snoopy and Hello Kitty.
…
Newer hotels try to offer memorable experiences.

Off the lobby of the P&A Plaza Hotel in Tokyo's bustling Shibuya district, a manager, Naohito Kurose, surveys the backlit displays of photos of revealing costumes that clients can have delivered to their rooms through vacuum tubes.

Nearly all are for women. They include cheerleader and sexy sailor outfits, low-cut tennis dresses, kimonos, beer hall fraulein get-ups and a red Santa's elf number.

"Couples come here and have fun picking out the costumes," Kurose said. "This may be unique to Japan, but the (girls') high school uniform is the most popular. The nurse's outfit is the second most popular."

Each room at the hotel includes menus for delivery of Domino's Pizza or KFC.