I happened to googling for something at the Korea Herald and look what I found! I don’t know if this is new, and frankly, it doesn’t scare me — I use Linux, and have never encountered a virus for my platform. But, um, you know, someone at the Herald should probably look into this.
Over the last week, my students have been making a series of unusual presentations. In my bid to: make conversation classes more interesting, and get students to think about conventional problems in unconventional ways, … my second-most-recent homework assignment for them was to consider major potential problems like a possible influenze pandemic; global warming; peak oil; and the ecological collapse of certain areas of the world. However, getting people to just talk about these problems rarely does any good. Young people are aware of them, are used to their existence, and seem less than appropriately concerned about them. So having …
Sometimes it seems like folks such as William Gibson and Bruce Sterling might be right in having turned to non-SF in recent years, since, after all, the world is just as surprising as cyberpunk was. Like, for example, with this orchestrated sabotage on the French railway system reported by BBC news: France’s high-speed TGV rail network has been damaged by a “concerted campaign of sabotage”, the SNCF state-owned rail operator has said. It said acts of sabotage overnight, including fires, caused huge delays to TGV services already hit by a long transport union strike over reforms. What’s unsaid is that …
… ‘zere is too much! I’m a little behind on grading, but not as much as I thought I would be a week ago. I have an unknown amount of textbook-editing left to go, but at least three full books I’ll need to proofread (possibly more than once for one of them) in the next few weeks. The proofing/editing requests are in the standard Korean mode: last minute, high-volume, jaw-droppingly short deadlines. I am unlikely to meet any more of those shockingly unrealistic deadlines: I’ve decided my health is more important than someone else’s panic. Chest pains are not a …
Up for air again. I haven’t posted much of substance lately, and I’m not (really) about to start now. The editing gig I took on has hit that chunk on the exponential curve of increasing involvement where time for sleep begins to erode, where I stop even the minimal amount of tidying I try to remember to do, where I stop cooking or eating properly. This is not nice territory, but the gig is almost done, and the worst of it, I hope, is past. More time for other things, then: too-long-deferred grading, working on drafts, edits, submissions, my column, …