The internet will KEEL YOU

Wednesday's Criminal Minds episode had a killer who was finding victims to kill through social networking sites, and streaming videos of the murders on the internet. The moral of the story was, don't put any of your personal information online, because the internet will kill you.

At the same time... two young Russian women had paid $3000 to a travel agency that had promised to arrange temporary Visas for them in the US, and had lined up jobs for them as lifeguards in Virginia Beach. When they arrived in Washington DC the jobs had fallen through. They were being instructed to go to a nightclub in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn at midnight to meet a guy who'd give them hostess jobs.

[Brighton Beach is a Russian neighborhood in Brooklyn, which also has a certain amount of organized crime.]

A friend across the country thought this was about a 9.6 on the sketchometer, and tried to convince them not to go. He asked Metafilter, and though the answers confirmed that this is how a lot of sex trafficking starts out, he couldn't convince his friends not go to to New York.

The internet sprang into action.

It's good to be concerned about your privacy on Facebook. It's good to think twice about the kind of data you're broadcasting and who you're broadcasting it to. But the best of human generosity and human kindness are just as present on the internet as anywhere else.

(no subject)

I'm at 29,000 words. Yes, this is me feeling like I'm finally getting traction and making progress!

I think I'm going to babble superlatively some more about The Anime Machine later. Today is not the day. However, it became clear almost as soon as I started reading it that with Sparks and Ashes I'm trying to "think technology" in a bit of the same way as some of Miyazaki's movies, or some of these other anime that deal with collisions between tradition or the environment and the technical/scientific -- and so Lamarre's book, especially its sharp and lengthy analysis of Laputa: Castle in the Sky, is clarifying a lot of things in my own mind. His book is very much focused on the question of how animation as animation (not just as texts, not just as narratives) deals with these questions, so it's not something I can directly transfer to my own writing, but I keep saying, "Oh, that's why X wasn't working, it's because it totally falls apart thematically."