Get Ur Phone On

Realized, chatting with Michelle yesterday, that I'm the cell phone equivalent of the person whose VCR clock keeps flashing 12:00. And that gag makes no sense to younger people, does it? Things don't seem to come with digital clock readouts on the front panel anymore, and they get the time from the local PBS station somehow. . .

So, decided to join the ranks of those with annoying ringtones. Since Michelle threatened deep hurting if I went for "Baby Got Back," I went with "Revolution" by some obscure little band from, of all places, fucking Liverpool.

Only things to come out of Liverpool are steers and queers, and they don't look like. .. wait, that's Texas. Never mind.

Also looked into developing for mMode, since I find it. . . annoying. . . that I can't read my own site on my phone.

Yes, this is an odd sentiment to express, and would not have had any meaning whatsoever as recently as fifteen years ago (if not ten).

Welcome to the 21st Century. Or the latter bit of the 20th, I'm slow.

Just registered for the developer program -- the free one, are you insane? -- so if this manages to hold my interest long enough, there might be a cell-enabled version of this thing soon.

Or I can run (one of) the XML/RDF feed thingees through a converter, but where's the fun in that?

Part of the impetus behind this is the article on DoCoMo in the September, 2001 Wired I picked up at Brown Elephant on Sunday. Fifty cents American, easier than lugging around the laptop to read the articles online.

One look at the 27th-floor Sky Lobby at NTT DoCoMo and you know you've reached the antechamber to something big. The elevators, swift and noiseless except for the crisp electronic ping that announces their arrival, deliver a constant stream of supplicants: Japanese executives in their obligatory business suits, Swedes and Finns looking ridiculously tall and blond, American engineering types pulling awkwardly at their ties. The place pulses with expectation and anxiety. Rising overhead for 17 floors are the offices of the corporate colossus behind i-mode, the world's most successful - almost its only successful - wireless Internet service.

So far, the wireless Internet has flopped spectacularly in every part of the world except Japan. WAP, the wireless application protocol that was supposed to put cell phone users on the Internet in the US and Europe, is memorable mainly for having inspired the slogan "WAP is crap." Yet i-mode, introduced with minimal expectations in February 1999, has attracted more than 25 million subscribers - one-fifth of Japan's population. New subscribers are still signing on at the rate of 43,000 a day, 1.3 million a month. The Internet is never mentioned in the ads they see; the i in i-mode stands for "information," and the logo - a large, stylized i - plays off the i that marks the information booths in subways and airports. Japan's infatuation with English-language product names even extends to DoCoMo itself: Ads proclaim it an acronym for "Do communications over the mobile network," but dokomo is also a word in Japanese. It means "everywhere."

Plus, the cover features a boom anime babe makes me think wrong things.

Another bit from that issue, from the bit I mentioned yesterday talking about manga (actually, a Top Ten list for the nation/culture):

9. EROTICA

"The Japanese have a long connection with rope, going back perhaps as far as 3,000 years. Prehistoric Japanese pottery was often designed with rope. In many of the Shinto shrines, you'll see huge ropes that mark the sacred ground. Decorative tying was used to symbolize good things; for example, the gift of money at a wedding would be wrapped in an intricate cord pattern. A kimono is tied onto the body: There isn't a single hook, snap, or button. Tying is an intimate part of the culture. Medieval samurai even had a martial art, hojo jitsu, dedicated to the art of tying up their captured enemy. At the turn of the 20th century, one gentleman, Seiu Ito, started photographing women in elaborate rope bondage and single-handedly popularized a style known as shibari." - Midori, author of The Seductive Art of Japanese Bondage (forthcoming from Greenery Press), was born in Kyoto.

Japanese rope bondage is spreading to the West: There are now American-based shibari Web sites and a West Coast shibari scene.

The Japanese adult entertainment industry produces 5,000 X-rated films a year. A censorship committee must screen each one for approval.

Added the link to Midori's BeautyBound.com, which I assume still works.

Not willing to check from work.

Unless I can check that from my phone. . .

. . . which would mean using it during a weekday, something I've been avoiding despite the fact that I do get 150 minutes with my plan for the month, and I doubt I've used 10.

Babbling. Cell phone geekery and Japanese bondage. And I'd so hoped I'd worked the VESH out of my system by now.