Post 700

(from someone at the marmot's hole comment board)

Yesterday, I got back from Kyoto for Chusok vacation, and it was great, other than an allergic reaction. I got a shoulder bag I like, that doesn't make Girlfriendoseyo cringe when I show up for a date lugging it around (I'm addicted to my books, see), but I'll write about that more, later.

I made it to 700 posts here at Roboseyo (if you include the odd unpublished draft that Blogger counts on my dashboard). That also amounts to 300 years of my surrogate sister Antaya's blog, or about ten weeks of Brian in Jeollanam-do.

It's been an interesting ride... blogging has been fun and it's led to some worthwhile connections. As time's gone by, the Korea blog community has gotten livelier and more interesting, as well as more connected: about a year ago, I decided that if I was going to put as much time into blogging as I had, I could only justify it if it helped me enrich my actual life -- one where I meet real people and do actual stuff with them, rather than just coming up with the silliest or smartest comment I can on a comment board, and getting my jollies when somebody at The Marmot's Hole says "I agree with Roboseyo".

Meanwhile, some other stuff has happened that's put blogging into perspective a bit... among the other things I've learned, part of it is that blogging needs to be held in its place in relation to other things, and last spring, while the ATEK stuff was important, it also showed me how far blogging can go, and where talking on the internet has its limitation -- another example of this would be Kushibo's call to take Anti-English Spectrum to task, not just online in English, but in Korean, and better yet, in the Korean legal system. Another case of this would be a friendship which I neglected last spring, while working on the ATEK stuff, and the Anti-English stuff, and with Ben Wagner on some stuff, which now needs to be made right. That sucks. And I still don't write home enough. Which is more of a problem now that the Blog is less personal than it was back in, say, 2007, when nobody read it.

See, the numbers can be an addiction. The hit counts, that stuff -- it gets to be a bit much: those hits are some kind of approval, from a bunch of strangers, which in its own way, is purer than the approval of friends who know you, who already have a vested reason for visiting the blog... but then, none of those 300 hits a day ever bought me lunch, or let me talk about losing my mom, or cleaned my apartment when I was sick, or lent me a book for my discussion class...

so I took the stat counters off Roboseyo a few Saturdays ago, because I don't want Roboseyo to be about hits anymore. I'll still talk about similar topics, because I care about them, or because they entertain me or give me joy, and because I love telling stories. Love it. And I enjoy the comment conversations, too -- they're great, especially when somebody tells me I'm wrong, and we get to argue about it. I actually don't mind being told I'm wrong, given how sloppily I often research stuff. If you want scholarship, this ain't the place.

I do funny and awesome videos, though.
I've mentioned before that I love mash-ups. Here's a mash-up of the 25 top songs of 2008, by DJ Earworm.


And, because it's a Korea blog, this one isn't quite as awesome as the previous one, but it's still pretty cool, and if you've listened to a lot of K-pop, it's really fun: the same idea, but with 2008's top K-pop songs, instead.