From the outside looking in...

[Motherland]

Or maybe from the inside looking out...?

This was posted on another board I frequent by a poster from Iran. He was asked how he came to be so familiar with western culture and media, and this is the narrative he typed up for us.
It's an extremely interesting and alien journey, I enjoyed reading it very much so I decided to repost it here. It was posted on an image board so the language/grammar is extremely informal, I'm going to censor the language where to not break any rules, but I'm leaving the rest of it as it is so just consider the context.

well the story begins in mid 90s, with the coming of this great magical device to our house when I was a kid, it was... a VHS player, from those first days I started to notice how different the ---- on TV was than what we could get on this magical device, it was nice see something other than depressing face of a cleric on every other channel for a change.

at the same time, the state TV had some decent shows every now and then, few animes but mostly as old as time itself, one of the few that got my attention from day one was... Robotech, even with censors you could tell there is something behind it, it was like, a lovestory with war background was turned into, a warstory with subtle hints of love somewhere, foreign series and movies on TV were heavily censored, sure they didn't mine a foreign woman in some series without a headscarf but beyond that was... well just plain cut, think about a 120 minute movie cut into more alittle more than 60 minutes, and when it's done you are still trying to make heads or tales from the plot.


then sometimes around 1999 I remember we got ourselves a what we called here Analog Satellites, suddenly Turkish channels which were quite interesting in many aspects, one was the fact that they spoke Turkish(duh!) and I being an Azeri, although didn't know toejam about the language personally, have heard it occasionally in the family, and parents could help a lot, then I discovered I had a knack for understanding new languages, I have tried English classes as a kid but every time something happened and dropped it in early semesters, like second semester, so I started understanding it more every year, at the same time, Turkish channels were VERY diverse on programming from old Turkish movie, classics of cinema from everywhere, to anime... the second spark for anime started with... well Sailor Moon, I still remember how I was fascinated with the details they used in animations like reflection in glass, or wrinkles in clothing, and other than that, some of the movies were just so appealing, I mean everyone has heard about James Bond but not many actually bothered to watch the ----ing movie here, but when Turkish channels started to air this old Bond movies it was pretty amazing... during the same time I got my first PC, and oh hello internet...


so here comes this great fascinating thing... enter the internet.

during the time, the latest trend between the young was chatting... and Yahoo Messenger was the drug of choice here... and by god it was horrible, from my first encounter I realized my countrymen in the internet were far beyond salvation... when the national pastime in internet is pretending to be a girl to lure boys into erotic chats just to humiliate them, you KNOW things are bad, so I started to TRY to communicate with the outside world with the little english I knew, and it was BAD, really really bad, but well all I had was time... so at the same time the Digital Satellite Receivers came, say hello to thousands of channels with broken codes... the main interest in our home was for some reason, few good German channels, VOX, ZDF, RTL, RTL Austria(to this day I wonder why it was called austria but I never saw a single Austrian flag on that channel) and they had enough similarity in programing to what I used to watch to keep my interests, there was more anime, more series and more movies... so with the help of a little english I knew and a german dictionary I started to understand German as well, so it went on and on... while at the same time, through the use of internet and a decent dictionary installed, I was brushing up my english... and I was like... holy ----, they can understand me, on some ways it was like achieving something like... communicating with someone on mars for me, not that Iran is a bydlo country (NOTE: bydlo is a Polish word commonly used on that board, its meaning is similar to redneck, but it's used a bit more broadly to refer to anyone who's uncultured and uneducated), rather the system is so closed in some aspects and constantly tries to show west as some sorta monster, although they learned to be subtle at it and not scream it in your face, so suddenly I realized the wall that IR always used to put bricks on didn't really exist, it was realizing the truth in Wizard of Oz...

although communication wasn't always successful, I still remember the very first time on Yahoo messenger I answer the ASL as 13/M/Iran, the immediate answer was "---- off terrorist", so for the next two years, I never reviled the location until I actually made some friends, it was a Forum where I used to get all these quality celebrity pics, you don't wanna know what it feels like to download HQ pics using a VERY poor working 56K connection.

at the same time, I started to understand the language itself isn't enough, there's always these little references that I don't get and it makes me feel like a blind person trying to understand color, so I started to follow those refrences and see where they lead to.


"so here comes the age of ADSL... holly mother of bandwidths, It's like an autobahn on the internet..."

-my thought on 128KB ADSL when I finally got it in 2003

so here I was experiencing this neat new thing... now I could be online without bother everybody in the home with a busy line! so I tried to get the series, movies and all the things I ever wanted to with this little thing I saw at some "media salesman"(someone who had a semi legal shop and sold a DVDs and I used to get movies from him and one day I noticed he is using EMule to get music) so I started EMule, E Donkey and Kazza, and all of them sucked beyond imagination, nothing but a very few short porn clips, that was all I ever got from EMule, and I uploaded more than 70MBs before finally downloading that 5MB porn clip... which at least was longer than 3MB porn trailers I used to get with Dial Up... about the same time, the whole filtering ------ry hit, it was just... sad.

someday, I started trying to download a movie, but didn't know where or how, so I started searching around and found a link, and it surprisingly ended fast, in a few seconds... but I couldn't open it with any video player I had, I mean I was fascinated by how you can put a 90minute movie in a mere Kilobytes but only if I could play the ---- thing, so me being a curious ---, I started searching around for how to play it, extensive research showed it was a seed, so what the ---- I was supposed to do with it? plant it in a garden? after installing Bitlord at that time and when my first download was over... I was lighten up like a million candles... my god it felt good, no filter no ----, easy download, I was like, ALL HAIL THE BITTORRENT P2P protocol... (removed: censoring this bit would be pointless, to say the least he was quite pleased he could circumvent Iran's filtering policies)

although Movies were always a hobby, and in fact being one of the first medias I could get with Persian(home translated stuff to boost sales of illegal media shops) and English subtitle, watching movies more than once seeing them in both subtitles helped a ----in' lot...

[Motherland]

and here comes a little mistake of my youth days, for reasons you might not understand, I fell in love with Rap music, in fact, I still have Gigs of old albums somewhere on my PC(I rarely delete stuff, sentimental value, it's like a diary or memento) so by that time I have started a bad habit of talkin' ghetto, you can't imagine how bad it is in writing, in fact I'm wondering how the ---- people got along with it.

Later I got this three little books from a bookstore specializing in language studies, Street English 1-3, and it helped understanding the whole concept of weird phrases, slangs etc...

btu to this day, although my taste in music has change, I'm neither ashamed nor regret those days, in fact those days helped me improving in their own ways.

one of my confidence boosts were when the cousin' of a close friend mine came here for summer, he was raised in England, I think he lived in sunderland, and by god that accent was inaudible, still, it was my first chance to actually "speak" English, he was amazed at the fact that unlike the girls in his family who tried flirting with him, my English wasn't the standard from the book and mellow Enough to feel comfortable, but when I overdid it, his reaction was hilarious

-STOP TALKING LIKE A BLACK MAN
-AI'GHT HOMIE, WHATEVA

good times...


so someday, I started looking for all the things I was missing, I started downloading Animes, Series, Movies like mad... felt great, and it felt even great not feeling lost in a crowd discussing a new movie or a game.

I remember how confusing for me was the first time I read the "speed of unladen swallow" line somewhere, it was just weird and yet interesting, so after following the leads I reached the "Holy Grail" movie, downloaded and still remember how was choking on laugh and trying to stay quiet because it was 4 in the morning when I first watched it...

through that I was introduced to Monty Pythons, and after chewing through the entire series and movie made by them I realized how many lulzy references I was missing on everywhere...

I always found it fascinating to go through all these little bit of other culture, to understand what makes them laugh or cry, what entertains them, and secretly laughing at those who didn't get the references thinking my god, they had easy access tot his masterpieces of 20th century art and they didn't bother?

sometimes I don't know why but something leading to another leading to another pushed me into suddenly finding myself downloading some good stuff, great stuff indeed, believe it or not, although a fan of Jazz but I never had a lead, but someday I was reading about Evangelion series, lead to learning how 24 different version of Fly Me to the Moon was recorded for it, lead me into FMTTM and then Frank Sinatra which I knew a thing or two about, than lead into downloading Best of ratpack, and stayed the whole night hearing the lovely collection, at the same time I saw the original Ocean's Eleven on satelite but miss half of it, then I downloaded the movie and just fell in love with the whole pack... EEO ELEVEN indeed.

Regarding western Media, there is something one should understand, the little details, those little references, I have a friend who has refused to watch Starwars for 5 years, and I constantly remind him it's not about whether you like the movie or not, it's about truly understanding the "*in vader voice* "Luke, I'm your father" joke in countless other incidents from a witty advertisement to other movies.

and one this that I find particularly enjoyable is always figuring it out myself instead of reading it somewhere, in the song "Here's to the Losers", there was part about "Loving not too wisely but too well" and I never really get it... so the other day I was watching "Othello 1995" and during the ending speech of Othello, I was like... oh so THATS what it meant... incidentally I actually get what the shrink meant when he said to Gregory House "making manipulative Iago out of somebody"

although I wasn't all alone, I had help...

[Serenity]

Truly very fascinating!