Left Flank linked to the excellent opinion piece on the state of Korean society by a Korean correspondent who spent almost five years abroad, titled “Koreans Need to Learn Life Skills.” She spells it out, asking essentially what kind of adults do you get in a society where children are shuffled between cram schools and have no childhood? A society with poor time-management skills, poor creativity, inflexibility when it comes to adapting to the massive changes that are doubtless ahead of us in this already future-shocked century, and… well, go read it. As I’ve said before, Lime is a fan …
Month: September 2008
Yay For Vanilla
I decided the other day to install some kind of forum software for my students’ use, and I was looking for someone free, easy, and somewhat configurable. Given that I’ve never installed a forum, or maintained a board, I was a little nervous about how setting it up, but I went off and downloaded a copy of Vanilla and spent about five minutes setting it up, about half an hour grabbing some extensions and prepackaged themes and styles for it, and about ten minutes setting up those, and now I have a functional discussion board on my website. (Not this …
What is the Sound of a Tail Wagging a Dog?
Last night, Lime and I watched a film I’d requested last semester for my Anglophone Popular Culture course, Wag the Dog (1997), and a couple of things hit me. See, the thing is, all this watching Korean SF movies and thinking in terms of the Korean adaptation of foreign genres or narratives to a Korean context has impacted how I watch American and other foreign films now, and I was asking myself how or even whether Wag the Dog could be retold in a Korean context. I haven’t seen many political films here, I’ll admit; The Host (2006) doesn’t feature …
The Brilliance Abounds!
On this post ranting about Deepak Chopra, I got a comment which I decided not to publish and mock, because I’d rather excerpt the crap in a post and mock in a more public venue. You might want to read the Chopra post, but then again, if you know me from this blog, I’m sure you can guess what I had to say, and the comment is pretty tangential, so you don’t absolutely need to read the post. The comment, sitting there in my Comments Awaiting Moderation box in all its glory (like a flaming paper bag of turds), went …