A few brewing-related events lately warrant a post. First, I ended up supplying the beer for a party hosted by Soyeon Jeong and her husband Dongjin Lee. She posted about the party here, with a photo (though all the faces are blacked out for some reason… privacy, I guess). I haven’t said much about it here, so I’ll just say I had a great time, it was fun to geek out, talk SF (and other stuff) and it was fun to see so many people enjoying my beer. Anyway, there were a few bottles of IPA left over, which I …
Category: GENERAL
Goodbye
I’m talking to my student debt. It will never trouble me again. Goodbye, student debt. Took me long enough, but it’s done. Now, on to better uses of my money.
Geek Out
“You know you’re with a bunch of geeks when…” was the line I said most often last night. Being among SF geeks is salutary, though; it’s normal for everyone to totally geek out over an iPad (as we did — trying out a bunch of bookreader and comic book reader applications in sequence), or to check out the bookshelves and talk about all the great books and authors contained thereupon, and so on. There was a party including a nice chunk of Seoul’s SF fandom population, including a number of my own friends and acquaintances. I supplied a sampling of …
Darwin’s Shockwave: On Violence and Human Nature
Last semester, I think it was, one of my students asked me what I thought about “나영이 사건” as an article topic for the campus English magazine for which students write articles in my journalistic writing course. If you haven’t heard about it — and you probably don’t live in Korea if you haven’t heard about it — “The Nayeong Incident” was a case in which a 57-year-old man raped a 9-year-old girl in a church. Brian in Jeollanamdo has the basics and some links, and all I can add to that is that there were a lot of variation …
Glitch: Tersesat Dalam Waktu (My First Indonesian SF Film)
So, I’ve just finished watching Glitch: Tersesat Dalam Waktu (English: Glitch: Getting Lost In Time) as I write this. (It will end up being posted later, but I’m writing it now, so I’ll just write it in the present time.) It’s one of the DVDs I managed to pick up while in Jakarta that is actually an SF movie, as opposed to mainstream drama or horror. (SF seems rare there, but horror is practically mainstream cinema in Indonesia, from what I can tell.) Anyway, the premise is that some sort of time loops have been set up for some unknown reason, …
The Uses of Doubt
I have been thinking about a story I drafted a while back — maybe a year ago, maybe 18 months ago, I can’t remember — and to which I haven’t yet gotten a chance to return, though I may soon. In any case, it’s a fantasy tale of two cultures — a low-tech patriarchal culture being overrun by a high-magic matriarchal culture. It was, in fact, inspired by what a Taiwanese student in one of my classes in 2008 wrote about the Taiwanese colonial experience — the way Taiwan in general experienced Japanese occupation, but also how the Chinese mainland …
There Are People They Shouldn’t Let Out in Public…
… and in Korea, many of them drive taxis. Monday evening, we met an extra special case of this, and it ruined a chunk of our evening. I wonder if it’s just the part of the city I’m in? I never have these sorts of problems outside of a stretch of city from Yongsan (where a random older bastard drunk tried to pick a fight with me for not saying “Hello!” to him with a hakwon teacher smile) to Yeokgok (where scumbag scooter drivers shout things like “slut!” at Korean women who happen to be beside a foreign man, and …
Wanna Be a Famous Blogger? Here’s Who to Criticize…
Though I tend not to really pay much attention to the hit rates on my blog, I occasionally pop by Google Analytics just to see what people have been looking at and what’s brought them to my site. This is something I particularly do on days like today, when I am stuck at home. I lost my voice on Monday and took today off to let the medicines I was prescribed kick in and make everything all better. Looks like I’ll be back to work tomorrow, but my throat is still a little blah at the moment. (I expect it’ll …
How to Kill Your Successful Business In Five Easy Steps: Step 4
For those just joining us, this is a series. There’s a series of links at the bottom of this post, so you can start at the beginning if you like. Step 4: When the Money Gets Tight, Screw Your Workers (Or Try Your Darnedest) or, Kick Morale in the Teeth Even Harder I’ve already traced through the process of bringing a company to the doorstep of ruin financially, and damaging morale irreparably. Now, the next step is much easier to pull off if your staff is easily divided in some arbitrary way — by race, for example, or sex. Another …
How to Kill Your Successful Business In Five Easy Steps: Step 5
For those just joining us, this is a series. There’s a series of links at the bottom of this post, so you can start at the beginning if you like. Step 5: Maintain Your Deathgrip Till The Bitter End There’s something to be said for the person who says, “Honey, I don’t think this is going to work out.” For the member of the garage band who says, “I’m tired of playing these songs, and you aren’t, so I think it’s time I quit.” For the hairdresser who admits that she has fantasies of setting clients hair on fire, she’s so …