I’m talking to my student debt. It will never trouble me again. Goodbye, student debt. Took me long enough, but it’s done. Now, on to better uses of my money.
Tag: PERSONAL
More Nigerian 419-Scam-Related Pop Songs
I posted yesterday about 419 scams and a pop song related to the topic, and after a little more poking around, I found a talk discussed here, in which a few more 419 scam-related songs are mentioned. Here they are: and: The first song “Yahoozee,” by Olu Maintain, while the second is “No More Yahoozee [The Reply],” by Harri Best Moradiyo. Both songs seem to be related to the travails and legalities of being a 419-scammer, in roughly the same way that being a business exec is glamorized, or criticized, in the American media. Which gives me an idea for some deep-future …
A Letter to a Teacher
The other day, I wrote a letter to a long-ago teacher of mine. He was my English teacher back in high school, and he was, finally, pretty great. I don’t know why, at the beginning of things, he was convinced I needed to be booted out of class. But when things finally turned around, they went great and I learned a lot from him. The reason I wrote the letter was because, a few months ago, a complete prick retired. The complete prick was another teacher of mine, and he was unrelentingly, unabashedly, and rather straightfowardly, a complete prick, at …
An EMP in Lagos
UPDATE: More here. ORIGINAL POST: Seriously, I get this weird feeling someday people might just be willing to support something like a sequestration of Lagos from the Internet, or some sort of EMP that would knock out all the computers there, creating a hardware shortage and making it difficult for Nigerians to replace their computers… maybe even getting other nations to forbid export of computers to Nigeria. Then again, how much spam comes from Korea? No, really. Maybe that EMP was a bad suggestion. The other night, some Nigerian scam artist like the kid mentioned in this article hacked the …
The First Album I Ever Bought For Myself
It was an LP. It was a soundtrack. I had that whole thing memorized a few days after I bought it. Later would come Glenn Miller (my mom’s choice, since I was about to start playing the saxophone), and then Bon Jovi (yes, Slippery When Wet, I’ll admit it), Miles Davis, Guns’N’Roses (and then the famous backpatch jacket), and then John Coltrane (and then the tenor sax I still have with me), and much more… … but this was the first album I bought for myself, with my paper route money, and man was I happy to have it so …
My Name in Korea[n]
A few responses have come in for my post about Names That Ain’t Workin’ so I figured I’d add something about my name, the use of “foreign” names, and more. First, the last issue. I don’t really see the point in taking on a foreign name. Sure, it would give Koreans something to call me that would be easy for them to pronounce, and avoid them mangling my real name. (Which they sometimes do.) But I like to think human beings, languages, and cultures are flexible things. I like to think I could live in another culture and keep my …
A Fleeting Update Redux Redux Redux
I’ve been insanely busy, with a guest visiting, so not much blogging going on. Next week is the University festival, as well, but I’ll be going on a trip during part of the week, and expect not much blogging then. However, I’ll do some updates and program them to show up for the next week or so, asI have things to say, just not much time to say them. In the meantime, those following my brewing adventures will be happy to note that the sour mash I did last week actually worked much better than I thought, and that the …
What I Learned From RPGing and GMing
Update: One of the points below was unfinished. I was actually planning on splitting this post into two parts, but I guess I left it scheduled and it got posted while I was doing other things. It’s been linked a few times, so… I’ll leave it as it is. Except I went ahead and finished that point. ORIGINAL Post: So: what did I learn from RPGing, and specifically from GMing? This is the last post in the projected series (though who knows, there may be more to say…) I think I should put this into two categories: stuff I learned …
PBeM and “Stellar Region”
Having discussed those times when I gamed with other people in live RPGing situations, I figured I might as well also talk about my limited experience with PBeM RPG gaming. That is, Play By e-Mail. It’s an offshoot of the older PBM gaming that developed before the internet, but I never played that. My first experience with remote gaming was online. At some point during my first three or four months of using the Internet–which puts this back in 1995, I think–I discovered the website Mormegil’s Scrollworks (now defunct, do it’s a dead link) run by Christian Walker, a wonderful …
Good Times in the Realms (and Other Places)
Continuing on my memories and reflections on RPGing as a hobby in my life… A few days ago, I ran across some fanfic I wrote in middle school. It was fanfic for someone else’s world, but not for a movie–though I’d been writing that (for Ghostbusters and, thinly veiled, The Neverending Story/The Princess Bride) for a long time. No, this was fanfic that I felt was my own creation, even if it was set in the franchised world of TSR’s The Forgotten Realms campaign setting. Realms is a sticky thing for me, now: for a few years, I spent every …