At the Conference (Besides Me)

This recent post by Ben Goldsmith, one of the people I met at the AKS Conference I mentioned here, reminded me that I didn’t discuss any of the talks I saw by other people — mostly, I like to think, because I was so overwhelmingly relieved by the fact my own talk was not a disaster. (According to Ben’s post, absolutely not, and he was very kindly encouraging in person too, as was everyone else.) Here’s what I saw others talk about: on the first day, I saw a couple of interesting talks in the morning. One by Paul Bradley …

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Done, Fun, Thinking Some

This entry is part 15 of 72 in the series SF in South Korea

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 …

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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 …

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Trope Salad and Penis Guns and Indie SF Films… No, Really.

This entry is part 13 of 72 in the series SF in South Korea

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 …

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