A Hikkikomori StopGap

HikiCulture Admin Strongly Suspected of Spamming

First off, my apologies for the image quality.

I’m very newbish at image editing and it was only this year that I discovered what “cropping” does.

Anyways, on to the topic.

The short version:

Someone has recently been spamming the HikiPhpBB forum. (1st screenshot)

There’s strong evidence that it is the admin of another Hikikomori forum, HikiCulture.

Evidence #1 is the conversation in the 2nd screenshot.

If the text is blurry, here’s the conversation:

Chair:

Me and thirteen other people are talking about you in my IRC channel right now Foolness.

Do you think we are saying positive, or negative things? You have a day to answer. If you don’t answer, I’ll beat you up.

(spamming occurs)

Later on…

“…”:

Cut this bullshit out now. You two have a problem, keep it off this board.

Google: (2nd spam account)

Wut R U gonna do about it tuff guy?

Evidence #2 is where this “Google” account pmed me:

Hi.

Sent at: Thu Oct 29, 2009 12:26 am
From: Google
To: Foolness

I’m Mr. Google, how R U?

The long version:

This all started with this blog post: Is HikiCulture turning more and more into a spam forum?

Then 2 HikiCulture admin (1 new, 1 the founder and user “Chair”) brought up some unrelated accusations of my time in the HikiCulture forum which prompted me to address the issue in a separate blog post:

Reply to Chair/HikiCulture admin

Around this time, the events prompted me to make two topics. One in the AnonIB /hikikomori/ board which is now deleted per the request of a user and another here.

If you visit the two above links, you’ll see how the events got cleared up under the comments.

After my name was cleared up and it turned out the accusation was mistakenly directed at me by a new admin, I focused on other blog posts I was working on and became inactive from the HikiPhpBB forum.

In particular I was kept busy by my recent blog post because of all the problems I have with getting it to post correctly.

Only after, did I return to the forum and address Chair’s recent reply to me. (I didn’t actually leave the forum though since that blog post was in reply to a topic made in that forum.)

That was when all these happened.

For a copy of my reply and Chair’s original post, just look at the last comment underneath the “Reply to Chair/HikiCulture admin” topic.

If the formatting is hard to read though, here’s my reply: (Note that Chair’s reply is chopped up into quotes)

Chair:

Sorry for being somewhat rude in my reply Foolness, I just don’t enjoy people making wild assumptions about me. In the future, if you want to know what my intentions are in anything I do, please email me at {{{e-mail removed}}}

Me:

Problem is, if you understood the context of the blog, I’m not even sure it was you who was editing the wikipedia article so why would I contact you?

If it was you however, then similarly, why should you be trusted to not censor the conversation when you have already strongly removed someone else’s post from a site you don’t own?

Contacting you privately was just not an option and the actions of both you and your fellow admin under the comment section further made it hard to follow that approach.

Chair:

I’ll likely respond to your email within a day or two of receiving it. I ask you of one thing though - if I’m to send you an email, please do not quote anything that I am to say in any of your blogs or elsewhere. If you do not comply with this request, I will not respond to any further inquiries. People quoting personal messages/email messages without first receiving consent from the person you’re quoting is, in my opinion, more unethical than a person ‘advertising’ their website on Wikipedia. This is only my opinion though of course.

Me:

It was a necessary evil I had to consider quickly.

When you and Quasar start bringing up an un-related issue in a blog topic, especially one that attacks my personal character, events can quickly become “he said/he said” and it could start a flame war.

In those circumstances it’s almost impossible to verify anything objectively because the admins are the ones throwing out the accusations and not just some members.

It can also be hard to rely on members on said community because you’re not sure how much they care about a flame war starting out.

In those cases, there are a few things that can be done to quickly quell the smoke. One of them is for one side to give out all the information they knew from their perspective.

Chair:

For the record - I truly feel that adding the HikiCulture link on Wikipedia is not unethical at all considering that:

Me:

It’s not about ethics. It’s about their rules for notability. Especially when a discussion page comment has been removed around the same time.

Chair:

My forum’s subject matter is very much relevant to the Wikipedia article the link is being posted on (If I were to stick a link to my site on the Viagra Wikipedia article for example, then yes, I’d agree with you on the whole ‘spam forum’ thing. There is high relevancy though).

Me:

No, in general, forums and blogs are not notable enough for Wikipedia no matter how related they are to the topic.

Even when this forum was on there, it was highly suspect.

It could’ve been easily attributed to the lack of English links.

When this forum was removed for some reason and not returned, it cemented the fact that the Wikipedians monitoring the article have decided that the article had improved enough that the forum link could be dropped.

Unless the link to this forum was re-added and gained consensus for notability, any other forum link replacing it is equally non-notable.

Even then, the issue between re-adding a forum link and deleting a post in the discussion board is far from the same intentions.

End

It was then that Chair posted that threatening reply above.

At that point, I didn’t understand what he meant by “beat up” and I ignored the post thinking it was just a normal flame.

Before I left though, I did saw the SPAM account post some spam but I never associated the two. (At the time, it was just 1 or 2 posts)

Then a couple of people pmed me (not much, I’m not an important person in any of the Hikikomori boards) and alerted me to the issue.

At first, I was even being overtly cautious and didn’t link the two events together but it turns out this might not be the first time Chair has spammed.

There was talk of a spam attack in /hikikomori/ linked to Chair which resulted in a backlash against HikiCulture in that board. (An event I never saw but was talked about in pm)

Coupled with the other evidences above and there’s strong evidence that Chair is the spammer based on all this.

Please note that after the “Wikipedia” issue got clarified, I’ve never seen Chair spam the HikiCulture boards elsewhere so I’m not removing the HikiCulture link in this post just yet.

I will however put a warning that Chair is strongly suspected of being a spammer.

I will also try to post this link in several social media sites so for those who are reading this that are not Hikikomori or do not care for the English-speaking Hikikomori community, my apologies for blogspamming in your favorite sites. I just felt this issue was serious enough to “report” as to keep future Hikikomoris from (possibly) being associated with a spammer.

See and download the full gallery on posterous

Posted via email from A Hikikomori StopGap | Comment »

Justice by Points

Justice by points essentially means they’d ignore a crazed ax wielding man walking down the street because they are buys ticketing people and trying to harass them into a half-excuse to arrest them. Then when the ax man comes back after butchering a family, they call a mini-army and take him down, then get even more “Points”. But the officer who just gives warnings and stares away bad guys before they do something bad at least doesn’t get a promotion, if not fired…

And, likewise, Prosecutors will go after girls photographing themselves nude but ignore insider traders and other high-profile crimes. More “Slam Dunk” cases, better score. Criminal who do a Lot of damage to society but can afford good lawyers, bad score.

Source: http://www.sankakucomplex.com/2009/09/25/schoolgirls-arrested-for-photographing-themselves/

Typo issues aside, this is why even as a Hikikomori, it is important to discuss the laws and policies of the world. It may seem like this is a problem for the outsiders or that we should deal with these issues with a severity of most internet forums (i.e. dogmatic and viciously against anyone with opposing opinions) but the problem is that the rest of the world are too busy tiring themselves to really listen unless there’s a special occasion like the election.

Yes, most of us aren’t politicians, political science students and internet sadists but that’s why we have one of the most ample opportunities to listen and apply that dream by the US Constitution Founding Fathers which was for law to be understood and discussed by common lay-men and not be controlled by a “ruling class” (I’m sorta combining a theme by Marx here). That said, I’m not saying many of us don’t know some politics but I think we as an online community even when talking about politics treat it like the rest of people do and I can sit here and type all kinds of adjective of what that means, but those of you who’ve participated in an online political discussion already know how, just like religious topics, they are often anxiety-inducing topics even to normal internet surfers. How we progress beyond a community that won’t crumble when bringing up those themes will be a huge test of how much our community has improved beyond normal communities. How much we value the information we get from that kind of a community may even be the X-factor in elevating us into an online community so unified the likes that may never have existed before.

Posted via email from A Hikikomori StopGap | Comment »

No country or population is more pure than another

Full quote:

No country or population is more pure than another, they each have flaws, although they can be different, and the definition of a ‘flaw’ can vary depending on culture and history, it’s all the same when it comes to the victim.

Like I said in an earlier comment, you’ll enjoy your life far more if you just forget instead of discovering more of the world. I don’t regret my decision since I rather see cruelty and face it daily than be ignorant, but this doesn’t even come close to what some people would call ‘sick and awful’ anymore, and you can see in the comments that I’m far from the only one who knows that.

The context of this quote is directed at a far far more severe issue than why I’m quoting this

…however the reason I wanted to share this with my fellow Hikikomoris is because of the way some anxiety based ones feel they are worthless compared to their fellow non-Hikikomori neighbors and how some people feel that Japan should have the monopoly on who should be categorized as Hikikomoris.

I have even read some posts pointing out how that this wouldn’t happen in America for example because the parent would just throw the person out on the street. They have some validity but sometimes these…”words” feel like one culture saying these things to “one up” another culture or another group.

I don’t have a quote with me but there are some forums where they would even argue which of their idol’s hometown is more dangerous just so they can say that their guy has more “street cred”.

Exceptionalism is very detrimental to a community and is in fact one reason why despite saying I had an elitist definition of Hikikomoris, I am not for pushing those people who don’t fit the definition to leave our environment. (This is also a hint at why some Hikkis can be so affected emotionally by some people forcing them to leave and alter their environment that they would go to such an extent as to kill or hurt that person.)

That’s why this quote comes off good (for us); with or without the context.

It is able to hint that it’s not just a country issue but a population issue. That means it can apply to any group even a small one like ours.

It highlights the stupid side of patriotism and alludes to exceptionalism without offending those same people by bringing up some specific issue they did but rather by challenging these people’s view of how pure they see themselves as a group.

It even hints at how escapism is not about withdrawing but on choosing to be ignorant of certain things.

On the flip side, it also hints at how withdrawing can also be a decision to escape or forget.

One compliments the Hikikomori’s decision, the other shows the noble necessity for why a huge portion of being a Hikikomori is about making a decision — for without that component, a Hikikomori would not know or forget what they are withdrawing from — and without that, the definition of Hikikomori loses any intangible quality that makes it different from normal social anxiety.

(except the fact that the word is Japanese if you buy that exceptionalist perception)

Posted via email from A Hikikomori StopGap | Comment »

Don’t waste our meeting time with questions or discourse, just give me the bullet.

http://jessicarandazza.com/uncategorized/140-characters-killed-the-art-of-language-or-did-it/

Sam said:

140 characters have killed more than language. People use these media to say virtually anything, at anytime. People are constantly using the “look at me!” approach with SM. How many tweets a day do you get (especially if you follow the active SM spokespeople types) that read like “going to SFO on my way to [enter conference name here]!”, “I just presented this killer strategy to xxxxx!”,”I can’t believe I ate all of that xxx”, and so on. These are things that most people would not consumer their day communicating to acquaintances, especially those they probably have not met and yet SM now gives permission, actually no, gives purpose to communicate the minutiae of daily life, 80% of which 80% of your ‘followers’ don’t care about.
I would like to see more thought (and better language usage) instilled in all of these media for them to actually be relevant for the long term.

Posted via email from A Hikikomori StopGap | Comment »

Nathan Fox, University of Maryland, and his colleagues subsequently reported that children with two short alleles of the 5HTTLPR gene whose mothers also reported receiving low social support were more likely to show behavioral inhibition (fearfulness and a tendency to withdraw) at age 7. Those receiving high support did not show the tendency, and those with the long alleles but receiving low support also appeared “protected” by their genetic makeup. Behavioral inhibition may put a child at risk for mental illness in later life (Fox et al., 2007).

Genetic predisposition to stress sensitivity may in some cases become a self-fulfilling cycle. Fox and colleagues found that some very behaviorally inhibited children were regarded by their mothers as hard to soothe and received less care and sensitivity as a result; this in turn tuned up the child’s sensitivity to stress through the alterations in the mPFC and amygdala mentioned earlier. In the model Fox and colleagues propose, genetically influenced temperament in early childhood influences the quality of caregiving children receive, which in turn shapes a child’s attention bias to threat.

—-A Cup Half Full—-

So Nietzsche’s strenuous view of life, “whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger,” just plain isn’t true. Stressors that don’t kill you in the short run may yet shorten your life or drastically lessen its quality.

But quit your moping and look on the bright side: The newly refined science of stress could lead to new drug therapies that can control stress or inhibit its effects on health. Also, depression and anxiety are not only results of stress, but also causes, and existing therapeutic and medical treatments for these conditions can help change how people perceive threats, put their life challenges in context, and cut stressors down to manageable size. The cycle doesn’t have to be vicious, in other words.
What’s more, the confirmation that the mind directly affects the body can work as much in our favor as it does to our detriment, as the personality-and-stress research above indicates. As APS Fellow Carol Dweck, Stanford University, has argued, personality is mutable (see Herbert, 2007); if our outlooks and beliefs about ourselves can be changed, so (theoretically) can our vulnerability to life’s slings and arrows.

The bottom line: Stress is not inevitable. Even with more than one’s fair share of vulnerability genes, there’s plenty of room to take one’s life and one’s mind in a less stressful direction. Relaxation techniques such as meditation and yoga, for example, have been confirmed to quell stress demons. Even if you are a determined workaholic glued to your cell phone or a fearful and angry urban neurotic like Woody Allen, stress-reduction methods are readily available to cope with stress in the short term and even alter perceptions of stressors in the long term.

Meyer Friedman, co-discoverer of the link between “Type A” behavior and heart disease, is a case in point. A self-described Type-A personality, Friedman wound up suffering a heart-attack at age 55. He made the conscious choice to change his ways in accordance with his own discoveries — including following his own prescription by reading the classics. To get more in touch with his slow, patient, and creative side, he read Proust’s languid seven-volume opus Remembrance of Things Past three times. In short, he trained himself to relax and enjoy life, and he had the last laugh at stress by living to the ripe old age of 90.

—-The Social Side of Stress—-

Any kind of frustration or challenge can cause stress, but by far the most powerful stressors, as measured by physiological stress responses, are those caused by disrupted or absent social relationships (Koolhaas, de Boer, & Buwalda, 2006). Loss of friends and loved ones, inadequate nurturance, and social isolation all have major impact on health and well-being.

At the University of Chicago, APS President John Cacioppo and Louise Hawkley have studied the health effects of social isolation, an increasingly common malady in the modern world. Among their findings are that lonely older adults show more arterial stiffening and higher blood pressure than their nonlonely counterparts and that the association between loneliness and blood pressure increases with age (see Hawkley & Cacioppo, 2007, for a review).

Cacioppo and Hawkley also found that loneliness directly impacts the HPA axis. In middle-aged and older adults (but not young adults), loneliness is associated with higher levels of epinephrine in the blood, and lonely people of all ages show elevated levels of cortisol. By desensitizing the mechanism whereby cortisol turns off more cortisol production, the social isolation frequently experienced by older adults may hasten physical decline (Hawkley & Cacioppo, 2007). Lonely individuals of all ages also have poorer sleep than nonlonely people and therefore get less of sleep’s essential restorative benefits.

Humans and other social animals particularly seek the company of others when facing threats — both for safety and for social support. The general affiliative response — what APS Fellow and Charter Member Shelley Taylor, UCLA, has called “tending and befriending” (Taylor, 2006) — is mediated by the hormone oxytocin. Oxytocin rises during times of separation or disrupted social relations. Just as the familiar “adrenaline rush” of epinephrine induces the familiar fight-or-flight reaction, it is oxytocin that causes us to desire company and social togetherness. It may be especially important in females, reflecting their different reproductive and survival priorities from those of males — i.e., caregiving (tending offspring) and lessening social tensions through friendly overtures (befriending).

—

Full Article: http://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/getArticle.cfm?id=2265

I do disagree that this implies that: “Nietzsche’s strenuous view of life, “Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger,” just plain isn’t true but I do hope all Hikikomoris not only social anxiety based ones take this into heart.

The reality of this situation is much darker. If all humans today would be injected by all the histories of the world right now, right here… these observations would be treated as statement of obviousness in most everything we value. Beyond stress, beyond fatigue, beyond genes is the reality that education, politics, recreation, entertainment, morality, religion… all have fallen due to this model.

…and I’m only creating this particular scenario because some of you may see the effects stated in this quote as that one made by a cold, hard scientist. Maybe not even a scientist, but written by someone with an agenda.

You might not be far off…

I certainly don’t have enough knowledge and passion in science to verify this effect and you could even accuse me as having my own cynical bias and agenda but I do know that it happens quite a lot. So much so that the reality of this situation is that the average cynic, even when they are accused of being cynics, are being optimists in their thoughts, actions and reactions.

To quote a conversation from a Law and Order SVU episode titled “Charisma”:

George Huang: Well, what do you want to talk about?

John Munch: Well, it doesn’t really matter. We could all talk till we’re blue in the face. It’s not gonna change the fact that the human race is ever-evolving and will always come up with elaborate, repulsive, and depraved ways to kill each other.

George Huang: And that’s what really bothers you, isn’t it? That you can still feel disgusted.

The full reality of this situation is also beyond the average cynical view in that we Hikikomoris aren’t heading towards the better. Most of us aren’t desperate enough to go beyond this normal state of decay and trauma. (Some of us even think we’ll be ok if we’re just able to hop on the “normal people” bandwagon!)

The reality is, the longer we Hikkikomoris act like normal internet surfers and forum posters, the farther the chance we’ll ever be able to steer the course of our future (and the future of our children and of future people who will be like us).

Remember, the reason most of us are this way is because in the past, the people who are similar to us didn’t do enough to change their present and create a better world for us. This isn’t just a criticism of them but also of the direness of this entire situation. Are we, today, going to follow in the footsteps of our past?

This is why I don’t mind reading rants:

I can appreciate that painting someone as ignorant, narrow-minded, or generally lacking perspective is a tactic of debate, especially on message boards, because it’s a way of asserting yourself as an intellectual superior. But before, you accuse me of being an ‘idealistic moralizer’ consider the image that you might be projecting as someone who resorts to tired conventions of online arguments.

—

From an un-Hikikomori related topic in IMDB.

It’s still surprising how I can talk to people one on one on the internet and they would share something personal but then they would end it with something like “Nevermind. I’m just ranting now.”

The truth of the matter is that rants can be one of the most sincere and honest form of conveying yourself to another person.

Yes, if everyone tolerated every rant, we’d be knee-deep in emo mud but at the same time, to a person who really cares for the substance of what another person is saying — Rants mixed with reasoning can serve as the coup de grace to many doubts on how you feel about a topic.

It is the knife that slashes through the hypocrisy of the sounds coming out of our mouths we call “typing”. It is honest emotion sharpening honest emotion and it unintentionally produces the “grain of truth” that is often ignored and under-noticed when not said; but often becomes “stating the obvious” when unearthed and posted in all it’s simplistic but underrated glory.

In this case, this rant shows how easy it is to potshot people under the traditional rules of the internet. Most internet veterans know what I mean.

The usual “you’re banned from this forum due to flaming, trolling and spamming” was never good enough. Even an internet who read Flame Warriors know it’s not enough.

(Edit: even an internet newb)

The problem is that most internet admins and mods think it’s good enough. So much so that those who try to break the mold often resort to making “subjective” decisions and rules that often end up serving as the flip-toss for the quality of THEIR forum rather than setting up a new standard for people to follow.

The irony though is that by settling on the idea that the old rules are the basic rules and that anyone trying to change them is only being politically correct, the lack of renewed ethical perspective for this view has created the modern day internet version of the “Politically Corrects”.

One that is exclusive to the internet in that depending on what place and what culture you stumble on, you can be a troll for opposing someone’s view where as elsewhere you can go to hell and high water to become a troll — and you won’t get accused of trolling — while the frustrated victim ends up being called the troll and that’s if BOTH of you didn’t get punished. (For Christ’s sake people, trolling is not cannibalism or Saudi Arabian surprise sex! It’s not that confusing to know where the line is drawn.)

This has become a whole mish-mash of subjective nonsense that popular internet surfers like to excuse as proof for the “diversity” within the internet when in reality — like real life political correctness — it’s essentially just a monotonous, parodic,  predictable and conformistic-producing mindset that is keeping the internet from improving socially as it has technologically.

http://hikkikomori.tumblr.com/post/176494546/just-a-video-upload-connecting-to-a-recent-post-i

…

This; of course, extends beyond our tissues and is more of a general internet issue.

But as Internet Hikikomoris we have a special role in this ecosystem!

…

As a group we are composed of people who like to claim they are just suffering from social anxiety disorder while others want to claim we are doing this for a reason.

If you’re a neutral observer who stumbled upon our community though, would you say we were among the top eschelon for pioneering a better place for discussions over the internet? Even if you lower your standards to “Hikikomori 2 Hikkikomori” discussions?

No.

Even if you just narrowed it down to the ratio of polite users?

No. (Hell, there’s even a HikiCulture topic where some posters said they liked the smaller community because the PhpBB forum suddenly got ruder when a bunch of new posters came in.)

The bottomline, as it stands, is that we’re no better and no worse as a community than most other internet communities.

Now why is that bad?

Because most of us know and admit that we are socially unorthodox.

Now we can be socially unorthodox and accept most people’s assumptions that we are below average pathetic little social creatures or we can be socially unorthodox and use other people’s criticism of us as opportunities to make ourselves socially above average.

The dissenters might counter with the cliche “Why settle for those two choices?”

I would counter by saying it’s because we’re special that way that we can afford to have these two choices pushed against our faces and still be able to afford other choices.

This is nature’s way of asking whether we want to adapt (and accept that we are special) or conform (and accept that we are normal). This is where we as Hikikomoris in our baby form of a community decide whether we want to learn to walk faster than the rest of the babies or go back to being among those who crawl and hope by doing so, we can crawl just as fast as the average baby barring the few talented among us. This is our quest, our destiny to change

…and the crossroads we must make

…and the crossroads we must take

…AS a community

…and NO. I’m not saying we should be a group who becomes stricter with how we treat each other and better at filtering and separating the rude and inflexible ones from the polite and inflexible ones so that we may not start flame wars as much.

…I’m asking of us to push our group, our individual ethical standards and our community to become more accepting of diverse social interactions by being able to welcome both those who are rude and flexible and those who are polite and flexible so that we may start the breeding ground for a community that can be flexible yet intolerable to those who want to toe the line and pretend not to be trolls, flamers, potshotters, “etc. other Flame Warriors” and invoke rightful justice upon them while avoiding causing rightful injustice to the ones who don’t deserve such harsh punishments because we set a goal to be socially unorthodox rather than striving to be the social norm. (or below that.)