Happy Chuseok, everyone. If you don’t know what that means, I’m talking about the Korean Autumn Harvest Festival. Some people mistranslate it as Korean Thanksgiving, but it’s not a great translation in my opinion. So… I’m going to geek out about a similar funny Korean-English translation glitch I ran across recently, mostly because it was fascinating.
… and woke remembering the dream, so I figure, it must be noteworthy. What I remember is that I was involved in making a film with Jetse de Vries. Mind, he was in the body of this other guy I know, a filmmaker in Korea named Josh, but it was Jetse alright, and he piled us all into a train with a ton of gear including stuff you’d see inside the van of the Lone Gunmen (the conspiracy theorists guys from The X-Files) that was about to cross Korea. Jetse/Josh began monitoring something that looked like a heart monitor, with …
A snippet: All around the world, but particularly in our great Republic, inventors and professors set about applying the universal intrinsic principle. Some worked with formless Unchangeables in their seance lounges, others with religious Notions, and a rare few, such as our Mr. Edison, with bulldog Actualities. The way he looked at it, if your calculations showed you couldn’t do something, then you went ahead and did it without the calculations. Here was one for whom the forces of electricity had been waiting! –from You Bright and Risen Angels, by William T. Vollmann A huge book, left behind by a …
One thing I’ve noticed since coming to Vietnam is that the internet is way more spam-laden. I never saw a quarter so much spam in Korea as I do here, and I’m not sure why my spam-blockers don’t prevent the popup windows like they (presumably) did in Korea. A lot of the spam is for online games, especially kiddie RPG-type games. But I’ve noticed other ones, too, and figured screenshots might amuse–or horrify–my readers who can’t experience the WTF? for themselves. (Warning: these may be NSFW.)
These e-cards have been getting popular all over Facebook, but I haven’t yet seen anyone use the medium to write a “short story.” Doubt there’s a new story format here properly, but when I saw this image, I couldn’t resist. Not that there would be a gill in an armpit, but…
No, I’ve never been, but I have dreamed about visiting Moscow and St. Petersburg. Most recently, last night. And since I rarely remember my dreams on waking, I thought I’d set it down. In which dream I apparently was seen writing poetry (something I don’t do much anymore) somewhere in Moscow, and this was enough for some organization above both the SVR (international intellligence service) and the FSB (the domestic one) to track me, watch me, and strongarm me by visiting my short-term rental apartment in the guise of a plumber and rendering the toilet unusable. Later, when waiting for …
Sometimes I think that we’re forgetting a certain kind of creativity in the hothouse world of genre fiction — a sense of freedom, actually, is what I mean. Yes, among us number the people who write the really weird stuff — audacious time travel narratives that turn all the tropes on their ear inteligently; stories of terror rooted in, well, something weird out the window — and a harrowing tale that one is (I’m thinking of Our Lady of Darkness by Fritz Leiber); stories imagining how, yeah, we are flushing the planet down the tubes, and what might happen to us …
You know those crazed Korean middle school girls who are fans of big famous idol groups, who hate the idea of their favorite popstar dating some other girl so much that narratives of gay love among those idol stars are popular in their circles? Yeah, well, I don’t know if Kim Jong Il ever put up a lesbian-fantasy website about Yun Hye-yeong, but if he did, he has certainly taken it down now. The young woman in question was in one of North Korea’s assumably few rock groups, Bocheonbo Electronic Band. So, Kim was in love with her, but she …
I have a friend who was born on the same day Elvis died. I think it was actually on the same exact day that the King shuffled off this mortal coil. I can’t brag of any such simultanaeities, but I discovered a while back who I share my birthday with: On March 4th, the following people of interest (to me) died: William Carlos Williams, the modernist poet Gary Gygax, the creator of the RPG game and specifically of the Dungeons & Dragons RPG game Meanwhile, the following interesting people were born on my birthday: Antonio Vivaldi (yes, the guy who …
Alley Kat Pale Ale is pretty much the only decently hoppy beer available on tap in most of Korea, and while I’m not really a hophead, I like a few glasses of it now and again. Well, earlier this evening Miss Jiwaku and I happened by a place in Yeokgok that had a big poster showing off the availability of this very fine brew, and we decided to mosey on in and try it. What we found was beyond our wildest imaginings. Miss Jiwaku described it as a “playground for ajeoshis” and that was a pretty fitting description of the …