Tag: KOREA

Old Foreign TV Shows in Korea

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Last week, I was coming home from Seoul by taxi, because I’d missed the last train, and I happened to hear a series of old TV show themes. From the commentary — what little of it I could understand — it was a kind of late-night retrospective on (American) TV shows that had aired back in the old days of Korean broadcasting, before Korean-made media had expanded to the point where it could dominate the Korean airwaves. It was pretty interesting, and the cabbie and I chatted a little about the shows, as each theme played. Some of the ones …

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Swiss Cheese News and the Un-Mediagenic Reportage Barrier

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Boing Boing has updated — with very little new information — about the case of Dymond Milburn in Galveston, Texas. “Hey, look, a little black girl in her yard! She must be one of those hookers we’re looking for!” “But the hookers we’re looking for are white. And she’s in her yard, with her doggie, fiddling with the circuit breaker.” “SO?!?!? She’s totally a whore. I mean, look at how she’s dressed. What, are you scared? There’s four of us and one of her, bro. Come on, let’s go enforce the law.” [Car door slams.] “Hey, little black hooker girl. …

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Hiking Boots?

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I’ll be going to a mountain on Wednesday, as part of a very interesting workshop involving Korean SF writers and astronomers — oh, yes, a listening comprehension test three days long, which I’m already failing, but more about that afterwards — and I’ve been told it would be a good idea to have some hiking boots. I’ll be in Seoul tomorrow, and would be able to pick some up, except I have no idea where such things could be gotten — that is, winter boots, in “large size” (ie. 300, 305, 310, or bigger, depending on the brand). Apparently the …

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Gnome!

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Usually you’d expect any mention of Gnome here to be related to the version of Ubuntu Linux I use, but this is a Gnome of a different color. Today an enthusiast of the Gnome Press — the company that published a ton of formative SF, like Asimov’s most famous books — discovered my blog and linked me from his own, which is called The Great Gnome Press Science Fiction Odyssey. He’s got a pretty interesting blog there with personal stuff and stuff about the Gnome Press books that he collects. Yet another SF fan in Korea bubbles up out of …

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Minerva, Censorship, Schlerosis, and IPs

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Events in Korea these days remind me a fair bit of that Demosthenes/Locke subplot in Orson Scott Card’s novel Ender’s Game. If you haven’t read the novel, well, basically a couple of really smart kids hijack the world political debate by posting pseudonymously online, using personae that are, in fact, quite different from their own personalities, sometimes quite consciously, to determine the way the global debate plays out. I’ve posted in the past about the Korean internet, censorship, and the odious “Real-Name System” that has essentially eliminated all possibility of real anonymity online at many websites in Korea by requiring …

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