Après le saut

After the jump: you've seen it all over, you sort of know what it means. What you may not know, which I now find myself disappointed to know, is that 'After the jump' is not a Battlestar Galactica reference.

It's a holdover from newspaper lingo. The 'jump' in a newspaper article is the point where the article is interrupted on one page and continued at that point on another page, with a notation of where to go to continue the article.

That is lame.

This just in: The heart wants what it wants

There is a ridiculous article in Chosun Ilbo Online from July 18th entitled "Obscenity Turns English Students Off Skype", about English students who go in Skype looking to practice their English with people who have clearly gone on for the duel purpose of sex chat and making fun of earnest foreigners. Here is a comment ironically more insightful than the speaker may know.

"Most foreigners using the Skype chat service seem to just want to meet girls and make filthy jokes. So I felt bad and deleted the program just two days after installing it."

Yes. What is the response?

"It’s impossible to monitor every Internet conversation. We are aware of the problems, but we can't take responsibility for them. In the future, we will discuss possible solutions to the problems such as word filtering, throwing abusive people out of chat rooms or making a blacklist.”

It's times like this that I wish all web-based programs were designed in Korea.
But the best part of the article is the illustration of just how lewd and debased the users on Skype are.
First of all, it is not apparent that 'Sperm for Girls' initiated this conversation. Furthermore, 'Jiyoung' herself is without a doubt a tease.
I would say what we have here is a clash of objective, in which you have a group of young Koreans single-mindedly thinking about improving their English without a thought given to the actual person on the other end of the internet connection and a group of young English speakers looking for cheap laughs and sex chat without a thought to the actual person on the other end of the internet connection. No one would blink if an ajeosshi went to a soldier bar in Itaewon on a Friday night and complained later that no one was interested in improving his English. There is likely no place, on the internet or otherwise, where foreigners who don't do some kind of martial art are willing to sit and listen to broken English for free.
Also, damn, get yourself together Chosun, it's spelled 'foreign'. You are a news organization for crying out loud, not some blogger.

Oh, internet tone

I am sure you are too busy to read the Best Week Ever blog, but as for me, an erstwhile American expat hoping to ease himself back into society, I find BWE blog an invaluable tool. Without it, how would I ever have heard about Nicole Richie?
Anyway, it is occasionally hilarious and an admirable parody in motion of the contemporary internet, as in this line from a post about a lawsuit against Alan Iverson's entourage for beating up some guy in a strip club.

"The jury found that [Iverson posse member Jason] Kane was liable for assaulting Godfrey, who was awarded $250,000 for pain and suffering and $10,000 for his medical bills. Iverson was found negligent for failing to supervise Kane." Apparently, members of your entourage must be supervised on a strict "Lennie from Of Mice and Men" policy, meaning Iverson must now rectify the situation by telling Kane about the rabbits and shooting him (literary spoiler alert!)

Were people always this unoriginal?

Or is it a result of blogging? It seems like nowadays some little idea, phrase, comparison, or shred of information can go from nowhere to everywhere so fast, I wonder if this is an indication that people nowadays are somehow more unoriginal than their predecessors or if it is just easier to get access to stickier ideas faster.
The thing that brought this up in my mind is the new Avril Lavigne song 'girlfriend', which I like (although the way she overenunciates her t's grates and the line "She's like so whatever" so oversteps the line of self-parody that I am forced to either be jolted out of the song or accept it as some sort of pop-ironic post-modernism-ism). The meme that got me thinking is the one that goes "Avril Lavigne's new song 'girlfriend' bears [endless] comparison to Toni Basil's song 'Mickey'." I have seen countless repetitive professional (i.e. for profit) media outlets echo this simplistic idea with phrases like "If she think's she can fill out Toni Basil's cheerleader sweater she's dead wrong" and "I like Toni Basil's song 'Mickey' better than Avril Lavigne's new song 'girlfriend'" and "If Toni Basil could've used the word 'motherfucker' in her pop song for twelve year olds, it would have been as good as Avril's new hit."
I think it is likely that people were always this parroty, and that the internet of today is to memes what toilet seats, doorknobs, and children's hands are to bacteria. That means that really sticky memes are going to be able to infest people's minds faster than ever, which means that people are going to become more and more ephemeral.

I sought out, watched, and embedded this clip, despite having earlier sworn to myself that I never would, in order to illustrate my point that the things that spread most readily on the internet are not necessarily the most noteworthy things on the internet. But you likely already knew that.

It is estimated that 70% of a person's leisure time is spent consuming and spreading ideas that exist for nobody's benefit but their own and don't add any new or helpful information to anyone's life. Stay tuned to Paint Roller, and together we can pull that number down to 69.999%

Make that 20,000 people

That's the number of people who saw my Korean video resume in the last three days. It has essentially petered out to a trickle since it was taken off the main page of Daum TVpod, but I'd say that's enough for now. The comments, about 120 so far, were almost all positive, with a few people pointing out the fact that my speaking was a little but stilted (it's not easy to memorize things in a foreign tongue) and one guy calling shenanigans on my age (why, how old do I look for crying out loud?). My appearance was compared to this guy:
and this guy:

and that's why I thoroughly endorse Sony handicams, the only handicam that really can turn a sow's ear into a silk purse.
I got a few job offers relatively quickly, but I'm still looking. I also got a few emails from middle and high school kids who were stressing out about studying English by themselves. I emailed them all recommending that they just focus on one piece of the language at a time, experiment with making new sentences whenever they can, and keep a notebook of things they can't say. Sound advice, I would say.
anyway, I'm already planning my second video attempt, a how-to video for people in Korea studying English. Sounds like a real crowd pleaser, no?

12,000 people have seen my Korean video resume

I don't know what to say about that. The comments have been very supportive, but I am totally speechless.

UCC video categories

I joined Daum.net, Korea's popular internet portal, and got a Hanmail email address, and I was uploading my resume when I noticed some interesting differences between the categories in Daum's user video service and Youtube's.

Youtube has the following genres/categories:

• Autos & Vehicles
• Comedy
• Entertainment
• Film & Animation
• Gadgets & Games
• Howto & DIY
• Music
• News & Politics
• People & Blogs
• Pets & Animals
• Sports
• Travel & Places

Daum TVpod categories:

• Stars
• Weird/Humor
• Sports
• Movies
• Commercial
• Dance
• Film
• Game
• Animation
• Military
• Parody
• Cars
• Emotional
• News
• Bragging
• Animals
• Cooking/Food
• Travel
• Children/Family
• Public Performance
• Presidential Election