Can you believe eight years have passed since I started this blog?! I can’t!

People come and go. Dramas start and end. Just like that, I have witnessed a lot of blogs flourish and then go into hiatus, leaving behind their marks on the world wide web. I believe that 2009 was the year when most of the big blogs went famous, and with that, more kdrama-centric blogs popped up to cater to English speaking audience hungry for more Korean Drama contents. I remember stumbling upon Dramabeans and admiring their super fast recaps; A Koala’s Playground’s passionate pool of commentators; Thundie’s Prattle and the cool squad; and Electric Ground’s lessons on the Korean culture. Drama blogs were relatively small in numbers, but it was a thriving community. It took months for a show to be subbed, and these blogs were like my lifesavers. Recaps, interview translations, discussions, and pictorials were scarce, because not many people could understand Korean back then.

I can still remember how ridiculous I felt when I first started the blog in 2011, because of many reasons: I’m neither Korean nor fluent in Korean, plus English is actually my second language. I was probably young and crazy enough to start a blog not in my mother tongue AND focusing on dramas from a different language and culture! I still cringe a lot when I read those old posts of me giggling and fawning over dramas, but that was part of my youth. Oh my…

But then, this blog actually helped me a lot. the talking cupboard is intended to be a place where I share what I am passionate about: the pictorials and interviews that didn’t get translated by the big blogs; recaps of dramas which were not covered by them; and things I found out while searching for questions I was curious about. I wanted to share whatever I felt need to be shared, but little did I know that the passion and tenacity I had pushed me to be better at both English and Korean. I read a lot of books to improve my English so that I could write better recaps, and I literally tore my eyes out reading Korean articles and searching for the meaning of words I could not understand. I was a girl who did not even know how to look up for things online, but thanks to this blog, I even reached the 48th page of Google because I was so keen on feeding my curiosity.

2012-2014 were a rough patch in my life, and that was when I blogged the most. I needed a distraction from my real life, and drama blogging was an outlet I could rely on with all my heart. I watched dramas and wrote about them; I read lots of articles about Korean culture and compiled the info I found; I put my heart and my soul into this little space on the internet. 2015 and 2016 were bleak as well, but I held on, thinking of the unfinished posts I have for the blog. Although I could not blog much after I started working in 2016, things started to get better, but I could not bear leaving behind something I considered my lifesaver.

This year, I finally get a stable job and I was thinking of getting back to blogging (yeay for more reading and writing time!), but I realize that blogging is not what it used to be. People are always in a hurry, and the last thing they would want to do is to spend time reading long posts. I really love using Twitter because it’s a convenient platform to share your real-time reactions on what you are watching or reading, and lots of people prefer knowing the gist of things through Twitter instead of visiting blogs like we used to do. More fans prefer watching the drama episode itself than reading the recaps, because the episode is readily accessible these days, compared to the struggle years ago.

But fear not, the talking cupboard is not going anywhere. As long as I’m alive, I will continue to write for this blog, but some posts will take longer time to be completed…because I just love to make it perfect and I would go to the end of the Internet just to feed my curiosity. Thank you for all the support, encouragement, follows, likes, comments, questions, and answers you have provided in the past 8 years! Looking forward to more of these with you guys and girls, to the ∞ and beyond ❤