Well, it’s a holiday in Korea, but I’m working nonetheless: the kids are having their first day back on a major Korean holiday. Interesting. Usually Mondays are tough; getting back into the camp groove after a few days home is always hard. If you go look at Google, the Korean front page has a nice graphic up today, that looks like this: It was a nice touch, as well as a good reminder for me. Happy Liberation Day to any Korean readers who might actually visit today.

I was reading Entry #88 over at Liminality, which The Big Hairy Hominid linked to recently, and some thoughts came to me… but this is a long post, so I’ll be putting it into the extended entry.

When I was plunking around for a link to Cory Doctorow’s wonderful story “Anda’s Game”, I found (on this page) an interesting link to the State of Play 2 conference and a very interesting talk by professor Leo Sang-Min Whang about the Korea-specific experience of gaming in MMORPGs (Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games). His area of focus in study is comparing East Asian countries in gaming Some of the interesting points he raised include: Unlike with young people Japan (and, Whang suggests, in other parts of Asia), cosplay (public displays performed by individuals who are dressed up as video-game …

For a long time I believed what the employees at local little cell phone shops always claimed when I asked: that a foreigner cannot get a regular phone with a regular phone plan under his or her name in Korea. They always claimed that I had to have the phone under someone else’s name. So it went, and my phone was under my friend Seong Hwan’s name. Seong Hwan generously allowed me to get a phone with himself signed up as my guarantor. He also let another co-worker of mine do the same. It always struck me as odd that …