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…