Dear drunken psychotic moron bastard, I’m sorry I couldn’t beat the living crap out of you. The problem is, I suspect that you’d be let off scott-free, while I’d be spending a week in deportation jail before being sent unceremoniously to Canada. I’m not sorry that I didn’t wave back at you. I do regret that you found it so offensive that I didn’t wave back at you when you waved at me with a snide look on your face and a plume of smoke searing from your mouth. But you see, contrary to what you think, I am not …
Month: December 2007
New President
Not the one I was rooting for. Nor the one the vast majority of my students claimed to be rooting for. I’m curious to hear how the ongoing “independent investigation” of various charges of manipulation of the price of shares will go. Especially since he’ll be immune to prosecution while he’s President. He’s, ahem, promised to step down if there’s proof. How can proof be ascertained if he can’t be prosecuted? Hmm? That’s all I’m going to say for the moment. Oh, and is family name is really 이, which sounds like “E”, not Lee. We all know which e-word …
Hacks, Pruning, and The Point of This Blog
The change in my sidebar — a few unused modules pruned away, plus the addition of a feed listing recent publications and sales — is only the most visible one on this site. I’m particularly proud of that hack, though: the stories listed are in order of their entry into the system, so forthcoming and published are mixed up a little, but the feed is displaying excerpts, which means I only need to make one update — to the Stories feed, in the header nav above — to update the sidebar feed. (It uses the excerpts function.) I also hacked …
Nemonymous
For those interested, there’s an interesting market I’d never heard of before, which the esteemed author and Interzone e-subs slusher Jetse de Vries mentioned recently on his website. Nemonymous is a series of anthologies put out by Megazanthus Press, a British publisher, and edited by D.F. Lewis. The neat thing is that they publish stories — temporarily — without a byline. (Though they’ve taken to printing the contributors’ names, not in order of contributions, on the [back] cover.) That is, they publish your work anonymously, and then later on let the various cats out of the bag. There was even …
How I Got Out of Retail, Classroom & Workplace Management, and An Idea About Task-Based Leveling Systems in Classes
An office dispute going on in the life of one Korean person I know, and the way that she tells me it was handled, reminded me of how I got out of retail. Well, really, after a few months, I’d made up my mind to get the hell back to University the next year, because those first few months of my “year off from school” opened my eyes to the way people without University degrees — and people with only a BA — live. That is, I worked in a record store. I actually did relatively well for myself, considering …
용산 멍청이, aka “You Can’t Run Linux on Laptops”
UPDATE (8 March 2013): Yeah, as it turns out, I ended up keeping the laptop: he couldn’t install Linux, IIRC, but I figured out a way, and it was handy for dual booting, when I occasionally needed to use a Korean installation of Windows XP. However, the purchase was still a rather dumb one, and as a rule I avoid purchases like this one… to a fault, as I failed to get a new portable computer before leaving Korea when, all told, I probably should have picked one up. Ah well… ORIGINAL POST: Yongsan Electronics Market is famous for cheap(ish) …
Dia-Gnosis
I mentioned having tests recently. I’m fine. The gut pain and rib pain seem, says the doctor, to be related to excessive leaning over during that editing project, and too much sitting around in front of my PC with bad, bad posture. Which doesn’t surprise me: other problems have been cropping up too — back problems, tension and even joint pain in one leg and ankle… Time to start exercising. Between Lime, the doctor, and me, there was a strong consensus that it’d be wiser to start with prodigious amounts of walking, and graduate to running later on, when I’m …
Torke
Michael Torke, that is. I usually review music in my horrible, pages-long bimonthly (or less often) catalogues of everything I’ve been reading, watching (films, TV) and listening to. But I just got my Michael Torke boxed set, Ecstatic Collection, and I have to say, it’s pretty damned wonderful. Michael Torke is a composer who was first mentioned to me by David R. Scott, a Canadian composer who was my instructor during my first year of studying composition. I followed up, and really liked what I heard — a strange blend of occasional snatches of pop music, Stravinsky, and good old-fashioned …
Admit it…
You wonder which celebrities you look like. But you might not want to know, after all. Case in point: It’s an old picture (of me), but… David Hasselhoff? In a ‘fro? (wacky webtoy via tina connolly)
Lester Young and the Jupiter’s Moons’ Blues
This story was the second story I wrote for Week Six of my stay at Clarion West—the week when Vernor Vinge was instructing us—and I was incredibly excited to see it accepted by Sheila Williams at Asimov’s SF for publication in July 2008. The issue is no longer on newsstands, but you can still buy a downloadable copy of the Fictionwise eMagazine edition here. The story also appeared in Gardner Dozois The Year’s Best Science Fiction Vol. 26. As of March 25, 2009, there is a wonderful podcast of this story at Starship Sofa, read by JJ Campanella, and illustrated …