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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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. …

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Seoul 2008 SF&F Festival Report

This entry is part 12 of 72 in the series SF in South Korea

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 …

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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 …

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Why Lime Bought a Lotto Ticket Today

She believes that if you’re done something good, you might get lucky. Lime saved someone’s life today. (UPDATE: I got a detail wrong. Just saying. Something’s been edited.) For lunch today, she had a very unusual, and inexplicable, urge to eat cheap, studenty-food. You know the kind of place — fifty things on the menu, terrible spaghetti, donkatseu, all that stuff. So after she finished work at the hospital, she stopped in at a place like that and ordered her lunch, reading a comic book while eating it. A couple of teenaged girls came in, and ordered their food, and …

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