Thursday, September 18, 2008

FXG, aXXo, and Shallow Movies

With P2P (peer-to-peer) sharing, it is very easy to download and watch movies that you think you would like to watch on a whim. You think you would like to watch it because the title sounds good, clean fun. Besides, the category says “comedy.” Like for instance, “The Love Guru.”

Previewing the movie by randomly clicking on the status bar, The Love Guru’s script seems to have materialized out of thin air ever so lightly. After being stressed, having fun means doing something that does not require much mental effort. You want to delve into something without being conscious about it. It is from one of those episodic moments that the working draft for The Love Guru came into existence.

They say that there’s a time for everything. Not true: law school exists. They say you can make time for something if you really want to. Maybe true, but one still has to weigh things carefully, because time doesn’t stop and it doesn’t wait for anyone. If The Love Guru hits the local movie theatres, I would definitely not watch it. I wouldn’t waste time on it.

But with the advent of P2P, movies such as The Love Guru parade their existence to my consciousness. And because I can type while I wait for it to finish downloading, I might, actually might watch it after I have been productive (this is a relative term.) I do not hesitate to open the .avi file because I know I can stop it anytime, like after previewing it for 20 seconds – which then I have a pretty much good idea about what it is. Maybe I will watch it sometime, but in the meanwhile it will stay in my hard drive.

“Maybe I will watch it sometime” – this ‘authorized time-shifting’ enables me to download without hesitation any movie which title catches my fancy. Because there might be time later on.

One might ask why I would let it take up space in my hard drive when I could go to sites that feature a library of streaming movies. The answer is that I have intermittent internet connection. What would happen to the world when there is this ultimate satellite that wirelessly enables everyone in every inch of the world to connect to the internet? Maybe then I would just surf about The Love Guru somewhere and would never let it take space in my hard drive. Until that happens.

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