Aha, I half-remembered this when I was writing about the Starcraft Pansori recently. Here it is! (Apologies to those who don’t have enough Korean to follow, but song’s essentially a cheerful little countdown of how four Zerglings get whittled down to one little fella during the trek home after being left behind enemy lines. For those of you too young to remember the 1998 game Starcraft, I hate you. (And yes, some people are still playing that game over here. That blows my mind too.)
Category: SF
PiFan 2008
I like the newish Listal Widget that lets you flow-scroll through the images in a list. This is an (incomplete) list of the films I saw at the Bucheon International Fantastic (PiFan) Film Festival 2008. (I’ll post tomorrow, at greater length, about the Korean Film Archive (KOFA) 괴수 대백과 (Giant Monster Movie Omnibus) retrospective I caught part of earlier this week.) View my Listal profile Get this widget at Listal I’m not going to stand a hope in hell of reviewing every one of them in depth, so I’m going to do a hit-and-run review: Ten words or less for …
Conference Change
Ack. I knew Dokdo would ruin something for me. I just didn’t think the conference I was supposed to attend in Fukuoka would be relocated to Seoul over the territorial dispute. My first, over-the-top reaction was to resentfully sneer and mutter darkly about how self-isolation is the perfect solution to every dispute, but Lime ‘s take on it was that it’s simply pre-emptive damage control, for, as she put it, some small number of netizens are sure to raise a stink if they hear that a Korean Studies conference is held in Japan during the current relapse of “Dokdo crisis”-itis. …
Quick Note
Thanks to, er, Noah Body mentioning a link in the comments to this post, I was made aware of a whole festival of Korean monster movies that’s playng at the Cinematheque. (I missed some I’d have liked to see — though I may get another chance, at some point… we’ll see — but anyway, still getting to see a bunch.) I’ll be there Tuesday, the closing day, for all three films. Just in case anyone else feelings like watching The Host, Bulgasari, and some other Korean film I’ve never heard of before. By the way, I wasn’t the only person …
A Late Bow of the Head
Damn, I fall behind on blogs and the rest of the world, and then this happens. I found out because weeks ago Ellen Datlow posted about Thomas Disch’s passing, and a particularly saddening way of going. Of course, I never met him. In fact, I’d only read a few of Disch’s books — 334 being the only novel, partly because it depressed me so, in an already-depressing time, but I also very much enjoyed his SF history The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of quite recently (here’s what I had to say about it) and, back in grad school, his …