I’m thinking I should start a reference page for all the Korean-SF goodness I’ve been coming across, and just link my post series from there. For those living in Seoul and interested in seeing SF films with other SF enthusiasts, editor/critic/translator Park Sang-Jun has teamed up with the proprietor of a newly-relocated cinema in Shinchon to put together Cinema Odyssey an SF & Fantasy film club that will meet periodically to view screenings of SF films. (That link is the Naver cafe, so you need to be logged into Naver to access it.) I met with Park on Friday just …
Category: SF
Done, Fun, Thinking Some
Aigo! It was a week ago tomorrow that I presented my paper at the 4th International Congress of Korean Studies. The experience was my first — I’d never presented anything at any sort of conference before — but I was told that nobody could have guessed it. I suppose being a windbag has its benefits, but people (the English-speaking audience members, at any rate) seemed genuinely interested in what I had to say. No evisceration, no dismemberment, just a couple of questions for which there was no time to offer answers, because I was on a panel that was way …
Forecast, Flash Update
UPDATE (18 Sept 2008): As Charles notes in the comments, the website now loads in Firefox, and even in Linux! I suspect this is a result of my having emailed a brief comment about it to the convention director, who emailed me just now to check if it was working for me after the fix. :) In any case, it was fixed impressively quickly, though the PDFs apparently remain inaccessible to on a Windows installation without Korean language installed. I’ll post here if and when that gets fixed, and pull my mirror file below. Forecast: scattered posting ahead. I’ve got …
Matt on Symmetry in The Host
For those into Korean cinema, Korean SF, or both: Matt’s written up a good post on The Host and the role of symmetry in the film, and linked my posts on the Host (starting here). I’ve commented to expand (slightly) on his observations. Check it out! As for me, I’m planning on working on a paper on the film and its political elements, somewhat expanding on my observations in the posts I’ve made here, and on the paper I’ll be presenting in a couple of weeks. I’ll be working on that sometime in the next couple of months, time permitting, …
Yet More Neat Neal Stephenson
Here’s a little more Neal Stephenson, this time discussing his new (soon forthcoming) book. And it’s set on another planet — yay! Too bad it’s gonna take me a year or two to get around to it…
Crouching Tiger, Hidden… Jedi?
Maybe I’m late for the picnic, but I got a kick out of this: [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqqmEGmDUi0] I’m really tempted to do up some fake, badly-translated about the racist Jedi who excluded applicants from the Space Blossom Peach Planet, fearing the encroachment of the Yellow Army into their ranks, and caused this whole mess, causing the Chinese to take the Imperial contract bid on the Death Star. (They skimped on the security plating, though, in their giant space factory. You just have to shoot this heat vent at the right angle and…) I found the video, by chance, here.
Summer’s End, Essay’s End…
Totally personal update. I imagine many casual readers won’t be interested. If you are, well, there’s a link, and you’re free to click it.
Trope Salad and Penis Guns and Indie SF Films… No, Really.
There it is. I hereby coin it. I googled it, and found only this, and that’s an email address for which even the cached page it was contained on was somehow empty. So Trope Salad is mine. I know, I know, you’re thinking, “You can have it. But what does it mean?” What it means is that I am trying to have fun while working on an academic paper. Always a dangerous route. What it signifies is the phenomenon wherein someone who knows absolutely jack squat about SF, or seems to know jack squat, treats it as a kind of …
Wanna Read Slush for Clarkesworld?
I’d do this, but I don’t think I have the time for now. (I’d be into it if my schedule were less hectic, though.) They need some people who know and like the magazine, and can articulate why they like it, to help find the best subsmissions possible and get them out into the world. Maybe they’re looking for you…
Seoul 2008 SF&F Festival Report
Seoul 2008 SF&F Festival Report I promised a report on the micro-con I mentioned here and attended last weekend, but it’s taken me a little time to get the photos I wanted to post along with it. (This text was written on Monday, but I didn’t get through the photos until today.) The set I’ve uploaded to Flickr can be seen here. I had a good time at this festival, which was organized by the JoySF fanclub. There were a number of events, including screenings, lectures, and hanging around in the dealer’s room. The Festival was held at the Seoul …