Nonfunctional Systems & The Art of the Avoidable Cataclysm #1: The Namdaemun Arson

An anonymous editorial in the Digital Chosunilbo asks: The pain of the Korean public will not be easy to heal. Watching the face of the nation disappear into flame, Koreans acutely felt the fear that the country they believed had grown into an economic powerhouse may be just a mirage floating above the desert sand. What would foreigners living in Seoul call Korea now? How can they trust in this country after seeing what has happened? The following is my first attempt (in what I imagine may become a series of attempts) to answer that question. The longer I’m in …

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Passports and Immigration and “Low Quality Foreigners”

Well, headaches averted, really. So far. I’ve been a bit of an ostrich, not paying attention to the whole Korean news/expat blog scene, and it came up and bit me in the back end last night. I came across these posts — like this one — that bespoke a big change afoot in Korean visa renewal procedures. The last I’d heard, those living here didn’t need to worry about that, but this sounded more complicated. Things like having to fly to Canada every time I get a different job, for example, or needing a criminal record check for March 1st. …

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용산 멍청이, aka “You Can’t Run Linux on Laptops”

UPDATE (8 March 2013): Yeah, as it turns out, I ended up keeping the laptop: he couldn’t install Linux, IIRC, but I figured out a way, and it was handy for dual booting, when I occasionally needed to use a Korean installation of Windows XP. However, the purchase was still a rather dumb one, and as a rule I avoid purchases like this one… to a fault, as I failed to get a new portable computer before leaving Korea when, all told, I probably should have picked one up. Ah well… ORIGINAL POST: Yongsan Electronics Market is famous for cheap(ish) …

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Eight Days

The title of this post has nothing to do with how long I haven’t posted here — though it may well be 8 days — but with my newest story project. I’m finally writing a story about (edit: Crown) Prince Sado, aka Sado Saeja. He’s a particularly unusual case in the Joseon Dynasty, whose story is told in more (prosaic) detail here. As far as monarchs who lose their minds, he’s quite an odd (unusual) one. I haven’t managed to do much writing in the last couple of weeks — some last-minute-emergency-hurry editing has dropped into my lap, and I …

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Zocalo’s Questions

A blogger who goes by Zocalo left a comment linking to a recent post about imperialist white male English teachers in Asia, and I started to type a reply. The reply got long enough that I knew it’d be multiple comments in the post, so I’m putting it here instead. Before you go on, you probably should read Zocalo’s post in full (as well as the post it links to). For those not click-inclined, here’s a snippet: I have mentioned a few times before that I read some blogs written by Caucasians teaching English in Asia. Some of these blogs …

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