Wednesday, April 4, 2007

mixi

After all that fussing and complaining and making excuses, I finally joined mixi not too reluctantly. "mixi" (pronounced mix-ee) is the name of an SNS which I believe is the largest in Japan? I think. My ex-boss wrote about the discussion (or maybe controversy) on how it spread so widely so fast in Japanese society and its addictiveness (see entries for May 18 & 19 here: it's kind of confusing that the blog keeper's name is me, monamie, but the author of all the articles there is my ex-boss kaduak).

Anyway, I had a bunch of friends who were making full use of mixi from a while ago, and they've always asked me to join it. Because mixi is a completely exclusive membership network, you need to receive invitations from a member in order to become a member. So I had several invitations sleeping in my e-mail inbox, but they were always there being untouched because I had no intentions to join the network and my friends did know about it. The reason for being so reluctant to join this online community was because I didn't really appreciate the idea of being connected online... how do I put this... I always like meeting people in person and making new friends in person. Put simply, I don't entirely trust online communication (don't ask why I'm in this business, keeping a blog). When I tell this to my friends, they tell me that mixi's safe because you only need to form your own network among people you already know etc. etc. and that is kind of true, but back then during those days I was still pretty suspicious about the whole idea. I was also too concerned with by these "rules" the SNS has. They're not real rules, but it can sound almost religious at times (just read my ex-boss's blog. it's all explained).

Now, the reason I decided to join it: it's simply because I have more time. I have so much time now that I'm almost bored to death. I actually did register myself on mixi but never really made use of it, and this time I decided to add some information about myself on it so now there's my profile and one entry of a journal. I doubt I'll have new entries everyday, but let's see how long I can continue this. Speaking of continuing, this very blog going on for so long is already like a miracle.

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Went to see the movie STEP UP. It's a dance movie and I think it came out in the US and other countries last summer or so? But it came out in Japan finally this spring, a couple of weeks ago. It wasn't advertised so much as compared to other imported films, but I got to know about it through my younger sister who just came back from her studies in New Zealand. She saw the film in NZ last winter (?) and loved it, so we went out to see it again for my sister and for the first time for myself. The film made me want to dance so badly - I can't dance that much, but I did use to dance classic ballet so I kind of regretted I quit it. Dance movies are cool.