Welcome!

So they've been running You've Got Mail a lot on cable recently, and I'm always looking for media that I don't really need to pay a lot of attention to while I knit, and hey, it's a movie featuring the internet made in 1998. The other thing is that they are showing this thing so often that I lost interest partway through and the next time I turned on the TV it was on again at the same scene where I left off. Who needs that in demand crap when you have basic cable service like that?

So the premise is that dude and chick are online buddies, and they're both nursing a serious e-crush for each other. IRL she runs a children's bookstore and he is a giant discount bookstore tycoon, who is opening a new location on the same block. They end up meeting and totally hating each other, of course. When they try to meet up as online friends, he finds out that it's her and bails. Despite the fact that she runs a well-established niche bookstore she goes under (how did Black Books end up surviving this scenario? I guess they same way they stay in business at all). Dude realizes he loves her and builds a connection in meatspace, both characters' significant others are conveniently disposed of, he does the big reveal and she is not at all upset that he's been deceiving her for months.

It wasn't quite as funny in the obsolete technology department as I was hoping it would be, although it did bring back a lot of memories. Do you remember where you were on the day you found out that the terrible modem noise it makes when you're dialing up can be disabled? Or wandering into a chatroom and being bombarded with "a/s/l?" I actually had quite a few online friends as a teenager that I'd meet through various games. Now with all this web 2.0 business people don't seem to really connect, they just deposit their commentary and leave. Or maybe that's just because I don't really involve myself in online social circles as much these days. Now all my online friends are my real life ones who I don't live near anymore.

That said, I think I finally "get" chick flicks. Yeah, the appeal should be obvious, but I had never watched one while suffering multiple heart fractures before. They work when you want wholeheartedly to believe that the perfect person will enter your life by astounding coincidence. The thing is though, is that the world really is a magical place and every romance has just as cute a story behind it. Knowing this, these movies don't really have anything to show me.

It also got me thinking that maybe Doug is the only good portrayal of shyness and weird anxiety ever. You know how Doug will encounter a totally normal situation and have all these insane fantasies about how terrible it will turn out and everyone will hate him forever and then it turns out to be totally fine, but he still freaks out about stuff later on? This film features lengthy scenes of typing and deleting, and frantically clicking the send button, and shutting the laptop and leaving. Who thought "that's what I want to watch, people spending hours composing the perfect email!"? I mean, five points for verisimilitude but minus several hundred for being unwatchable.