/////// 10tonfunk

An article in the Jul 15-31 edition of 博客天下 (Blog Weekly) titled “你的糗事 我的快乐” (Your uncomfortable moment, my happiness) offers some good news: laughing at other people’s misfortune is a universal pleasure. The article talks about how the FML phenomenon has spread to China and lists five popular Chinese sites that do the same kind of thing that Fuck My Life (fmylife.com) does for English language netizers (my new term). Since I’m hip to the jive, I know that ‘fuck my life’ has spread, like a spore, from the nexicon (net lexicon) to the oral vernacular — people talking, for those of you that don’t habla netinese. If you actually do useful things with your life you may not be aware of the whole FML phenom. It works like so: people submit short “true”stories and you laugh at them with the giddy relief that wells up when something bad happens to someone else.  You also get to vote whether the person “totally deserved it” or “I agree, your life sucks”. It’s like the embarrassing stories page that teen magazines used to have. Here’s a post from the Best of FML: “Today, the girl I’m secretly in love with, whom I was talking to on MSN, told me she’d ‘brb in 10, no wait 20, oh make that 30 min’ depending on her boyfriend’s stamina. FML.” At time of writing 27123 agreed his (or her) life sucked, and 2,876 thought they totally deserved it.

Since youse hepcats prolly knew all about this without having to read a magazine about blogs, I’ll skip straight to the actual point: the Chinese versions.

Some excerpts from the intro to the piece loosely translated by yours truly:
These point of these sites is to “by speaking about the things that made you unhappy, make other people happy.” And if that isn’t fun, I don’t know what is. These kinds of “分享自己糗事” (“share your own misfortunes”) sites are inspired by the American FML site, and “help people escape their loneliness and boredom by sharing their grievances.” There’ s this amusing bit: “而’FML’正式英文’Fuck My Life’的缩写—翻译得文雅点儿可以说是’我糟糕生活’”(“FML stands for ‘fuck my life’ which can be translated in a slightly more refined way as ‘my terrible life’”).

While many of these sites are ripoffs of the original FML site, some creativity has gone into the interpretation of the name: “如今, ‘FML’被国内’拼音党’们成形地翻译成了’发霉啦’” (“Now, China’s ‘pinyin gang’ has made FML stand for ‘post your misfortune!’”). The clever part is that 发霉啦 is spoken ‘fa mei la’ which sort of matches up with…  yeah, you get it.

The five sites and paraphrases of their descriptions in the mag:

1) FML中文网 (fml001.com)
The earliest shanzhai version of FML. It also has the most users. There are two kinds of posts: those translated from the original English-language, and posts Chinese users themselves.

2) FML翻译小组 (fmlchinese.appspot.com)
“Besides letting us see scandals of people all over the world, what else do these sites do? Yup, they let you learn idiomatic English!”. This site translates FML posts, showing them in English and Chinese. You can sign up and translate the amusing fuckups of foreigners (not exact translation), while learning English. The site lists both already translated posts, and those awaiting translation. It also has some funnyass pictures.

My comment: If you’re reading this you should seriously consider getting over there and doing your bit for East-West relations by translating  “Today, I didn’t realize until I was home that I’d thrown my retainer away with my tray at Chick-fil-A. FML”. Nothing brings cultures closer than being able to express “Today, my brother randomly told me that unless he’s wearing underwear, his jungle of pubic hair would get caught in his zipper. Thanks for the lovely visual. FML” across the language divide. Good luck with Chick-fil-A, but pubic hair is definitely a useful 单词. Plus, it’s infinitely better than those d-bags Maike and Mali and their endless 感动ing exploits which seem to saturate every Chinese textbook.

3) 糗事百科 (qiushibaike.com)
This is an original China share your pain site, with an extremely active user base. The site’s slogan is “happiness is built on other people’s pain”. These stories are supposed to actually be real, and the posts are much longer than on other sites. The site has already published a book (an encyclopedia, I suppose) of users’ stories.

4) 实话实说FML (shss.tv)
Compared with other ‘share your pain’ sites, this one is a bit more extreme, suitable for younger post-80s post-90s users. Another way it’s suitable for younger readers with limited attention spans is that the posts are much shorter than on other sites. There’s also a mobile site which allows people to use it on their phones — smart considering the number of people with internet enabled phones is high, and young users may be more likely to have phones with net than actual computers.

5) 小事一箩筐 (xiaoshiyiluokuang.com)
This site was started by a bunch of young passionately interested in internet industry. The purpose of the site is to allow people to record their trivial experiences  and study them — raising small daily occurrences to a higher (and perhaps unwarranted) level. You can also acess this site on your phone, allowing you to record your trivial experiences in real time and share them with one and all.

There it is: 5 Chinese FML-type sites. If you made it this far I’d say yeah, your life does suck, and that you also totally deserved it. lolz totes ROTFLMAO 10tonfunk ftw!

Related posts:

1. 双鱼 现在有一些特别好的”bridge”博客把中文的博客翻译成英文: ChinaGeeks, Veggie Discourse, chinaSMACK, ChinaHush, 等等. 这个对不能读汉语或读汉语特别满的人(之一我)有很大的好处. 通过这个博客和写的博客的人的努力我们可以更好理解中国和一些中国的现象. 这些博客的帖子部分常常有很热闹(而有时候很傻)的谈论....

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