Introduction to the Strawberry Fields
Hello, and welcome to the Strawberry Fields, formerly known as
Aurora Minui's Virtual Pets and More Page!
Since about November 1997 (has it been that long already?!), I've been patiently slogging along,
steadfastly ignoring my more popular and successful competitors in the virtual pet page market.
Unlike those helpful pages that give you Games to play with your Tamagotchi, or Cheat
Codes, or Pretty Postcards You Can Send to a Friend, or the latest exclusive news about this
ultra-cool robot pet that's being released by some company that'll go belly-up in a few years,
this page has always been proud (and will continue) to offer nothing more than my own
perspective on various virtual pets of various kinds.
Boring, you say? Where are the free downloads, you ask? You want more, you say?
You, you, you. It's always about you, isn't it. Well, TOUGH BEANS. You want free postcards?
Go to The World Wildlife Fund's E-card Page
and go crazy there. No, they don't have cute little Tamagotchi or Postpets dancing in
a circle, but at least you'll actually be doing something to help save this ball of dirt
and water we call home.
*ahem*
Yes, I am slightly bitter, aren't I?
Well, that just goes to show you that not all virtual pet lovers are nice and fluffy
animal-loving romantics. I, for example, happen to be an intensely bitter and ironic
animal-loving cynic (and yes, I do make use of Care-mail
and E-cards, both by the World Wildlife Fund. The cards may not be the flashiest in
the world, but hey... it's for a good cause. And it's free.).
I'm also a student, with very little spare time due to school, work, and a variety of
time-consuming interests... so anyone who decides to send me charming e-mails like
"Deer Ora your slaking updat yor page pls" will promptly go into my "Block Sender" list,
and will be publicly mocked on my webpage for all to see.
(Sadly, I'm only making up part of the above "e-mail". I have received actual e-mails like that,
with pretty much the same spelling/grammar/lack of manners. Little Anonymous Person who
harassed me back when I was on Geocities, are you reading this?)
I also don't take kindly to such nonsense as:
- Stealing images from other pages without permission.
Yeah, I used to do this when I was a newbie too, but soon enough I learned it's BAD MANNERS... not to mention semi-illegal from a copyright position. Before you take any images from this page, or someone else's, please ask permission. It's also considered only proper to note on your homepage (or wherever you decide to display the images) to add that you got the images from such-and-such a site, and clearly display the link to the site close by.
- Stealing text from other pages, period.
There's something to be said about plagiarism... it has to be said because it's unprintable.
(And if you didn't get that joke, try telling it to your parents or a jolly old uncle or someone. If they are of a Certain Age they will have a hearty laugh at the joke, and hopefully their day will have been brightened up a bit.)
Anyhow... plagiarism is when you steal text, or a large portion of someone else's writing, and either:
a) Make it look like your own ideas and writing, or
b) Do not attribute the quote to where it belongs.
While it's a lot harder to enforce anti-plagiarism rules on the 'net, that doesn't make it "okay" to steal large swathes of information from someone else's page. If you can go to the trouble of cut-pasting information from another page, you can go to the trouble of cut-pasting the URL or Internet Address of the homepage you stole it from. - Linking to an online image
Generally speaking, if you see a picture you like on someone else's page, and you've asked permission to use it, you do not link to the image directly. For example, if you really liked my pretty pictures and art, you should not do something silly like use the code
< img src=http://members.xoom.com/twotone/prettypicture.gif" >
to show the image on your page.
You should click on the image with your right mouse button, and save it to a disk so that you can upload it to your own website later.And finally:
- Calling my knowledge of Japanese Virtual Pets into Doubt
As petty as it may seem, I get very peeved when people try to suggest that they know more about, say, Tamagotchi than I do, because they got all of the characters on all the American Tamagotchi.
Quite simply, I spent a great deal of time hunting down OFFICIAL BANDAI JAPAN APPROVED books on Tamagotchi, and also looking at most Japanese magazines that even peripherally mentioned them. (Of course, these began to disappear by the time the Forest and Ocean tams began to come out.)
So I actually do know the names for all the Tamagotchi, thank you very much, and I'm quite sure of the information I've gotten from the various Japanese books and websites. (Whether I was able to satisfactorily translate them is a separate matter, and one which I am only willing to discuss with other native speakers of Japanese and English.)
On a related topic, I also get frustrated and peeved at people who nag at me to put up more information on the Devil-Tamagotchi, the Yasashii (Easy) Tamagotchi, the Santa-Clautch, etc.
I am not willing to put up any information on a virtual pet that I don't have, and won't ever get in the foreseeable future. Since I'm busy with a fulfilling and exciting life of my own, I also have little patience for people who e-mail me out of the blue and order me (rather than politely ask me) to translate entire Japanese sites for them.
Okay, I'm done ranting now.
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