Metanoiac has a video up which shows some of the psychotic training practice used on Kim Jong-Il’s Bodyguards. It’s very gaaaaaaaaaaa.
Category: KOREA
Creating Passionate Users: What can we learn from game developers?
A couple of links on games and how they may link to ESL/EFL teaching: First, an article at Wired on the often overlooked positive effects of gaming. And at Creating Passionate Users, Kathy Sierra asks What can we learn from game developers?. She has some interesting audio files on the subject, and the big winner concept is the idea of using levels to stimulate interest in users (or, for us teachers, students). Interesting, and I think I’ll devote a little thought to it.
The Dog Poop Girl Story
Well, I live in Korea, but this is news to me. Maybe I just haven’t been keeping up on my Korea-related blogs. In fact, that’s probably why I haven’t heard about Dog Poop Girl. This is one of those inconsiderate idiots I rant about from time to time, the kind of person who walks around as if nobody else in the world even exists. She took her dog onto the subway and when I crapped on the floor, she didn’t make a move to clean it up; instead, she apparently acted as if nothing was amiss. Annoyed passengers gawked, and …
With Tech, Festina Lente
This Chosun Ilbo report describes how Korea is in a hurry “to turn what sounds like science fiction into everyday life.” To me, as someone who knows SF pretty well, this is a little bit of a scary proposition, especially considering other elements of Korean culture. For one thing, Korean netizens came out shockingly in favour of censorship during the blog ban a few summers ago, despite the fact that censorship violates a civil right that people only a generation before were fighting to wrest from the country’s dictators; personal security doesn’t seem to have been enough of a concern …
Urville, France and Other Imagined Places
Apparently I missed out on the attention that was lavished upon this film about am autistic artist who has created an imaginary city in France. (That link is to a video page. I’m partly posting it so I get a chance to see it on my other PC; it’s not loading well on the laptop so I’ll try at the office.) I found the link on Maureen McHugh’s blog, but apparently boingboing also had a post about it. It triggered for Maureen a post on worldbuilding, which is interesting. I haven’t actually gone on a binge of mapping and worldbuilding …
ㅋㅋㅋ, k-k-k, kekeke: leet mutation?
In the Boing Boing post linking to this wikipedia article on the origins of leetspeak, I saw something I thought was unusual: it was claimed that “kekeke” was a Korean equivalent of “hahaha”. What’s weird about it is that the root of the expression is actually ㅋㅋㅋ, which is to say, kkk, without any vowels… and that, usually, when I catch students trying to render ㅋㅋㅋ in English writing, they use a simple “kkk” or k-k-k instead of kekeke. I have to wonder where the vowels got added in, or why this variant in any case arose among Korean gamers….
OPERATION_NUKOREA
Young Hae Chang’s OPERATION_NUKOREA is enough to make me actually worry about North Korea a little; moreover, it’s enough to make me worry about the fact that so few people I know here seem worried about North Korea. Via the now-defunct but still cool Magnificent Melting Object, which was once run by someone I bet I would’ve gotten along with.
South Korea slaps Microsoft!
Yay!
Red Pen Machete
I spent a lot of time last weekend grading. Okay, not as much as I might have liked, but a lot nonetheless. I have read through, added comments, and graded the Mind Maps of the Advanced writing class, but not yet recorded the grades in my records. I have read through, added comments to, and sorted (but not assigned letter-grades) the Daytime Elementary Writing course’s Mind Maps. I have read through, added comments to, and sorted (but not assigned letter-grades) almost all of the Magazine Demographic/Advertising Analyses in my Media class. I have uploaded to a gallery, but not yet …
TIP!!
The other day, Lime was helping me look around the Korean online markets to see how prices for tank-topped water-coolers compare to offline prices. In my old place, in Jeonju, the water tank company let subscribers have the cooler for free if they bought a certain minimum number of bottles a month, and let me tell you, in a country where the taps don’t gush drinking water, a cooler is a wonderful convenience: it’s not only nice cold water on call, but also hot water on call, hot enough to make a cup of tea immediately, if you like. Well, …