Sakura of DOOM

Yaaaay! I have a new DVD player and it is region free and! It plays DivX files! Finally! I can watch video files on TV! And! It plays .srt files, which means...

I CAN WATCH COFFEE PRINCE ON MY TV!

Possibly I even tested it by watching the chestnut scene and the couch scene for the third time in a week.

And to make this post not entirely pointless, I present for your edification and amusement (if you speak Korean and want to mock my horrible grasp of the language): Korean I have learned from watching dramas so far (excluding appellations).

(I actually wasn't going to post this, because I felt it only illustrated how dumb I am, and I don't want to mock kdramas as a whole, since I have very limited exposure and am still trying to differentiate kdrama tropes from things informed by Korean culture. But I remember how interesting I found it when anime/manga-newbies posted about their first impressions. So hopefully this will be somewhat interesting, though I am not at all sure it is.)

• I love you - learned from every drama I have seen
  
• I like you - also from every drama I have seen
  
• I'm sorry - also from every drama I have seen, but definitely from Coffee Prince, as there is one scene in which Eun Chan says it about a billion times.
  
• Hello (for answering the phone) - from all the modern dramas, of course. On a side note, I am geekily amused by how much plot takes place on cellphones via calls and text messaging, as opposed to emails. So much so that taking your battery out of your phone so people can't get to you is sort of like deleting your LJ!
  
• "my lord" - from Damo
  
• Library - clearly my brain prioritizes this, even if dramas usually do not
  
• Don't go! - from Coffee Prince, although I think this will come in handy

Sadly, I have not yet learned key phrases like "I am the god of death! I will kill you!" or "absolute destiny apocalypse," two of the first things I learned to say in Japanese.

Reading the essays on Shirky makes me realize yet again how much I love the internet. Yes. I am an internet junkie. And was just talking to another old HS friend, gave her the link to my LJ, but asked her to keep it off her personal website, and thought just how many people probably think I'm strange because I live online. And many people don't get at all why I love the internet. But I love it because it lets me talk to people halfway around the globe in no time at all. It lets me read people's thoughts, thoughts that differ from mine substantially. It lets me talk to people who have substantially different life experiences from mine, and it makes the world smaller in a very tangible way for me.

This was sparked by a series of essays on Shirky about telcos trying to get into wireless internet and how they're doing everything wrong -- restricting content, focusing on m-commerce and the like. And how they don't seem to get that people talking to other people is what makes the internet work, and what will ultimately make wireless internet work as well. Because I'm not paying 7 dollars a month so I can find out what time movies are playing from my phone. But I would pay 10 cents a message to be able to send my boyfriend pictures I've taken with my phone. And if my phone let me check up on LJ or my email or whatnot while I was on the go? Yeah, sign me up!

I always get pissed off when people try to limit content on the internet or try to censor it or bring it over for their own corporate use. I disliked the takeover of Geocities by Yahoo on principle, I don't like how Google just bought Blogger, I hate the idea of MSN in general. This is also partially because I'm anti-corporate-world and extremely paranoid. I don't like the idea that these big conglomorate people can tell me what I can or can't have on my page, or the shutting down of fan pages and the like. I'm sure my model of a perfect internet is not a practical model, because mine is very anarchistic. But this is my forum for hearing voices I otherwise wouldn't have access to, and it's my place for finding complete new worlds, like fandom. And of course one pays for these freedoms with kerfluffles and flame wars and the like. But to me, it's worth it, ten times over.

I fell in love with the internet the second we had it hooked up to our house back in ninth grade and the technician guy typed in Yahoo's URL. And I found out I could search for anything I wanted to. And it was amazing. Ninety some percent of the sites were crap, of course, but there were people out there doing things, and it was incredible! Then I was looking for fiction online, because Taiwan=lack of English language books. And I stumbled on some XF fic, and I was a goner. I started watching the show because I had to catch up on the canon. LJ and blogs are just icing on the cake, and to me, they're almost the ultimate expression of why I love the internet. There's this giant blog/LJ network now that operates much differently from personal websites, and it's much faster and easier to navigate than sorting through links. And most of them are completely centered around individual opinions and thoughts and lots and lots of text! It's perfect.

So that's my love letter to the internet... may my cell phone soon follow in its steps.