Well, I’m glad to say that after a weekend of stress and even a certain amount of impotent rage, things seem to be sorted. The whole mess could have been avoided if the guys on Friday hadn’t been utter dolts, but at least someone higher up intervened and rendered their dolthood less than all-powerful today.
Tag: KOREA
I Need My Own Everything
… because too many people in this world are moron, and those morons seem to be the ones tasked with making sure things don’t fall apart. Yes, my closet is still subject to a huge water leak from the floor above, the Housing Office people remain idiots — and potentially larcenous idiots, given how they went through the apartment above looking for loot to steal (to the point of unwrapping a present left on the counter), the old, junky washing machine ruined a shirt I’d just gotten and had worn twice — because it’s so old and crappy that the …
“Low Quality Foreigners” and Mockery Thereof
Right, so if you’ve been around the Korean expat blogosphere at all, you’ll have seen this image: Okay, so yes, this is a cartoon about a “low quality foreigner,” a creature which has been a bugbear in several different communities in Korea, not all of them Korean. Yes, mostly it’s Koreans who’re talking about it in terms of “low quality foreigners,” because that’s how the term gets translated and that’s the kind of terms Korean media would use to say what Westerners living here would call “total f*cking losers who don’t belong here.” But before I get into that, I …
Woah!
Left Flank linked to the excellent opinion piece on the state of Korean society by a Korean correspondent who spent almost five years abroad, titled “Koreans Need to Learn Life Skills.” She spells it out, asking essentially what kind of adults do you get in a society where children are shuffled between cram schools and have no childhood? A society with poor time-management skills, poor creativity, inflexibility when it comes to adapting to the massive changes that are doubtless ahead of us in this already future-shocked century, and… well, go read it. As I’ve said before, Lime is a fan …
What is the Sound of a Tail Wagging a Dog?
Last night, Lime and I watched a film I’d requested last semester for my Anglophone Popular Culture course, Wag the Dog (1997), and a couple of things hit me. See, the thing is, all this watching Korean SF movies and thinking in terms of the Korean adaptation of foreign genres or narratives to a Korean context has impacted how I watch American and other foreign films now, and I was asking myself how or even whether Wag the Dog could be retold in a Korean context. I haven’t seen many political films here, I’ll admit; The Host (2006) doesn’t feature …
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 …
Bwi~! and Buyeo Wives, &c.
That’s a word I think I made up myself, in Korean. At least, I’ve never heard anyone else say it, though Lime told me it sounds like the mopey protestation of a five-year-old. 븨~! This word is occasioned because my Sado Seja story did not make it into the Datlow/Mamatas anthology Haunted Legends. I’m sure competition was fierce, though, and they’re good editors. If only Nick had had the time to savage the story, I’d have learned a lot, I imagine. (But who has time?) Anyway, I’m going to do what I often don’t do… send the story out immediately. …
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 …
Word Processing in Ubuntu in Korea
I used to have a lot of trouble opening files, as the two favorite formats among students are .docx (What do you mean you can’t open it? It’s MICROSOFT!) and .hwp, the propreitary file format for the word processing application most widely used among Koreans… but used by nobody else on earth. (What do you mean, you prefer formats used globally and accessible from multiple programs?) I’m running Hangeul 2005, but there are instructions for the 2008 version here (or here, recommended at Marmot’s), and as for .docx files, a simple tweak should render your OpenOffice capable of opening those …