Bullet screens: you what?

What with the BIG DAY next week, internet restrictions have been tightened up. One thing that I found particularly interesting is that bullet screens on bilibili have been suspended. I then realised that this sentence would make absolutely no sense to anyone outside of China, and that in itself was quite interesting. So let me explain.

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Bilibili is a video-streaming website, a bit like that other famous one, “you” something… yes, Youku (YouTube is, of course, banned here, so there’s Youku, the original fake, plus loads of others).

Bullet screens are basically YouTube comments, but in lurid colours and scrolling across the screen obscuring the video you’re trying to watch, appearing at the exact moment the writer posted it.

Imagine you’re watching an episode of your favourite boxset one evening. It opens with a man staring into the distance. Up pop thousands of characters: ‘wah, so handsome’, ‘who is he?’, ‘what is he looking at?’, ‘handsome brother’. These characters fly across the screen, covering the face of the man and generally being annoying. Behold, bullet screens:Image result for bullet screens china

Originating from Japan, bullet screens, danmu, are essentially just real time comments but I find them so fascinating for a number of reasons:

  1. Surely everyone knows you should NEVER read the comments. And yet, they’re on top of the bloody video!
  2. MY EYES!

Part of the problem (in my opinion) is that the comments are short, and while there are lots of examples of witty or clever comments, there are also a lot of totally inane comments. My brain wants tot think that when people write longer comments, they have to think a bit more about it and so the quality of the comment will be higher, even though this is patently untrue (see: YouTube, the Daily Mail website, most recesses of the internet). I’m just a long form nerd: no paragraphs, footnotes and page numbers = no party.

I asked a friend what he thought the appeal of bullet screens were and he asked why anyone comments on anything – which is a good point. I love shouting away on Twitter but I rarely comment on news articles, videos, etc. I like to passively consume media (probably a little too much) but I don’t think that my comments on it (especially if they amount to “aww, so cute”) merit being published. One might argue that my tweets aren’t exactly scaling literary heights so why do I type those out, and I will tell you that the answer is a heady mixture of boredom and narcissism and there’s nothing much I can do about that.

Thankfully, you can usually switch the comments off on video streaming websites, and even better, there are no comments at all on the pirated DVDs I buy from the shop round the corner.

Things that are banned in China

You probably know that Facebook is banned in China. It’s been banned for years now. But did you know that the following are also banned (either permanently or temporarily):

Google (other than google translate), WhatsApp, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, WordPress, LFGSS, gambling, going to Tibet, talking about something that happened in June 1989, baking soda, tinned soup, mentioning certain topics in WeChat groups, changing your WeChat profile picture or username, imported blue cheese, going anywhere without your passport, Brad Pitt, airbnb (it’s not technically legal and right now it’s completely banned in Beijing), hot air balloons, drones, the New York Times and the South China Morning Post but not the Guardian, having a dog without a license, some shoes, giving your child a Muslim name if you live in western China, marmite, and Justin Bieber.