My employer doesn’t have good access to any of the fulltext databases with literature stuff (like MUSE or JSTOR). While it looks like this might get rectified in the next while, I am not going to be able to get my hands on this article. Which, in case you’re lazy, is titled “The Singularity Ate My Homework and Other Reasons I Can’t Predict the Future” by Ariel Mameon. It was published in the New York Review of Science Fiction back in 2004, is apparently available in the Texas A&M database. Or am I misunderstanding the listing? I’m wanting a look …
Category: PERSONAL
Two Videos From a Busyish Day
Today was kind of busy, so here are a couple of videos I found amusing, with comments as to why they caught my attention. [kml_flashembed movie=”http://www.youtube.com/v/iC65ufGUvKM” width=”425″ height=”344″ allowfullscreen=”true” fvars=”fs=1″ /] Have I mentioned that at a high school variety night I performed a freejazz/fusion version of this song? Sort of. Same bass line, and I hollered some of the words into the mic before the atonal saxophone weirdness kicked in. (I played my tenor.) I was accompanied by a keyboard bassist named Jennifer Duggleby and a drummer named Mike Murza. I doubt anyone recognized the song. Maybe one or …
How to Rob a Bank
Jwz has it. Jwz has moved it. And they say you can’t learn anything watching Hollywood movies. This is a crime that just couldn’t have happened without the “heist” genre of films. But reading this, it struck me: there will be a last bank robbery in the world. People will still be hacking banks for as long as that’s possible, but someday paper money will stop circulating, or continue to circulate but become worth less than the trouble it takes to rob it. When it does, there will be no more bank robberies, except as political statements or artistic performances. …
Angst and Rant No(t much) More
Yesterday I had one of those days that is inevitable for everyone who lives abroad. No matter how happy you are in general, there are those days, those cursed days, when everything you don’t like about your chosen place of residence just comes up and slaps you in sequence, one by one. It’s one of those days when the place you’ve decided to live, and the place you care about or even love, decides to drive you crazy. Sometimes, people have those days when it’s just really one jerk who annoys them. Sometimes they have those days because of the …
Moments from a Summer Voyage (Leg 1)
I’m trying to find a new and better way to write up my trip. I wrote a blog post detailing the first leg of the journey — from Seoul to San Francisco, through Denver, Wyoming, Portland, and Seattle, until my departure to New York City. But I don’t think it’s very interesting, and I’m against posting boring crap online. There’s so much of it already, even on this blog. So it’s going to be a slower catchup, I think, as I work out how to say in an interesting way what these places and the people I saw in them …
Losing Wonmisan
Okay, okay, I’m being dramatic. But, then, it was dramatic. Mark and I were hiking up Wonmisan as usual, except we found a couple of new features on our dirt trail. Now, if you don’t know Wonmisan, you should be informed that, unlike some mountains in Korea, it has both stairs and a diirt trail to the top. If you ask me, stairs are for shopping malls and apartment buildings: I don’t go out into nature just to climb stairs. Especially crappily-built, unevenly-sized stairs like you see on a lot of mountains. So Mark and I, we usually take the …
What’s Happening in My ‘Hood?
I know, I know, I promised a post detailing (to some degree) my adventures this summer, but I just had to note what I saw yesterday. It was the weirdest thing, or, well, maybe not. Maybe it’s totally normal, and I just haven’t been paying attention. Yesterday, I was invited out but I was feeling a bit worn out and decided to stay home for most of the day, get some cleaning and some work done. But in the evening, I decided to go take in a movie. I didn’t care which movie, but I wanted to get out and …
Back to the…
Well, I can’t actually say it’s “back to the grind,” because, just like with different coffees, each semester is unique. I realize I haven’t posted in ages, and getting back into that habit will be particularly tough given how busy I’m going to be this semester. Not that my classload is particularly onerous: I have only one class focused on writing, and another class which will involve written homework with any regularity. The other two courses are more related to speaking and presenting and so on. This is a change of pace for me, since I prefer the content-related courses …
Back!
One of the great tragedies of the film version of The Lord of the Rings, in my opinion, is the fact that the ending was left out. You know, the part where the story seems over, the world is saved, the journey finished, and then the characters get home and have a big mess to sort out there? That always seemed to subvert expectations in a way I respected, and seemed also to reflect the messiness of real life in a way that makes more sense than the kind of “one great act saves the day everywhere” kind of stuff …
At the Airport
Here I am at another airport, sitting in yet another coffee shop, waiting for yet another flight. It’s been a long summer and I haven’t posted much at all — haven’t had the time, though tons has been going on. Hope to be updating and logging some of my adventures soon, but for now, I have one more leg in what has turned out, in many ways, to be an all-out Odyssey. So, yes, as they so often say, more soon!