Naveen

For anyone looking to export highlights from an ebook off a Kobo E-reader, here’s an easy way:

After you’ve plugged your Kobo into your computer and can see the Kobo drive, there should be a file called Kobo eReader.config. It’s located on the Kobo drive in the “.kobo” folder inside the “Kobo” folder.

Right-click on the Kobo eReader.config file and choose to open it with a basic text-editing program like Notepad.

Add the following code to the file at the bottom, or anywhere as long as it’s separate from the other code:

[FeatureSettings] 
ExportHighlights=true

Safely eject your Kobo ereader from the computer.

With this, the long press menu of a book will have an extra option, “Export highlights”. Using this will prompt you for a file name and export the annotations to that file in the root directory of the device.

I have a Kobo Clara HD (highly recommend) and can confirm this works like a charm.

#reading

Amsterdam, October 2019.

#travel

Amsterdam, October 2019.

#travel

As long as you live, shine, Have no grief at all. For your life is short, and time will claim its toll.

#quote

Spinning in circles, leaving trail recursive, Killing thoughts nascent, framing ideas inconclusive, Sporadic explosions, of blur and noise, The pain grave, suppressed of voice, Closed the drapes, stared at emptiness, One thing led to another, had to let go, nevertheless, The words pour out, my mind's heart beats on, Writer's block was here, and now it's gone.

#poetry

Thoughts on the 2005 Korean film. Directed by Kwang-Hyun Park.

We are dropped right in the middle of the Korean war. Three surviving members of a North Korean unit, two South Korean deserters and an injured American pilot all find themselves in a strange village tucked away on a remote mountain where the inhabitants lead an idyllic life; they know nothing of the outside world and are blissfully unaware of the war that is raging on.

The North and South Korean soldiers have a go at each other at first, and in the chaos that ensues, a grenade goes off, destroying the stockpile of corn in the storehouse and cutting off the village's food supply for a year.

The soldiers then decide to work together and help the village rebuild the storehouse. The rest of the film is centred around how the walls of loyalty towards the soldiers' respective nations crumble as new friendships forge. There's a lot that unravels along the way – goofy comedy, naive love, sadness, introspection on the stupidity of war, brotherhood, as the soldiers begin to drop their veneers and discover their humanity.

Of course the narrative isn't inventive, this is staple pacifist terrain mind you, but it was the treatment that refreshingly stood out for me. This is easily the most colourful anti-war film I've ever watched. There's an almost Disneyesque surrealism and an absurdist hue to the proceedings. Testimony to this is a scene where the soldiers and the entire village come together to kill a wild boar. Another director might have conceived this very differently, but here a seemingly simple scene borders on the fantastical, with some inventive use of CGI.

The acting is top-notch. Jae-yeong Jeong (Lee) and Ha-kyun Shin (Pyo) play their roles as respective North and South Korean soldiers with effective restraint. I also loved Hye-jeong Kang who plays Yeo-il, a challenged girl. She revels in the comedy scenes, especially in the one where she pulls off a grenade ring, mistaking it for an actual ring, and the subsequent scene when it rains, well, popcorn.

This film is supposedly an adaptation of a long-running stage play, but I was constantly reminded of Le Roi de cœur by Philippe de Broca, another comic allegory about war in which a poetry-loving Scotsman is assigned the task of finding a bomb left by the Germans in a French Town that has been abandoned by everyone except the inmates of a mental asylum who crown him king. The difference here is that while the de Broca film is mostly a comedy, Welcome to Dongmakgol has so much more infused into it.

The last few scenes are profound in many ways, but one line that effectively encompasses the anti-war pitch is when Pyo tells Lee just when a barrage of bombs are dropped around them and certain death stares them in the eye:

If we had met somewhere else, in some other way, we would have had real fun.

#film

Haven't decided what to write in here, but here's what comes to mind when I think why I need to bother even:

• To let go of a dangerous obsession with perfection – a huge reason why I don't write or publish stuff out into the ether that is the Internet, is because I think my writing isn't good enough; the fear that it doesn't match up to the bestselling, praiseworthy writer that I've sadly imagined myself to be is crippling to a point where I end up not writing at all. Not a good way to live.

• To streamline consumption of information – There's an enormous amount of information constantly buffeting at me which is why I sense an urgent need to structure my thoughts on whatever I consume. Writing about these things might help crystallize any reactions to those thoughts into a concrete framework of ideas.

• Self-reflection – There's something about writing uninhibited, without being wary of the boundaries of structure or reason. This is also going to be an attempt at writing from the heart, without any machinations or gimmicks (that seem to have plagued my writing, of late).

#rant