::A Geek in Korea::

My students have been finishing their semester projects this week. There are a large range of topics, anything from fishing, American football, cooking, magic tricks, chess or even beatboxing. It’s all up to the students to decide their topic, so over the course of a day I might see sixty different presentation topics. There are a lot of common hobbies and shared ideas, but I really like the variety and self-expression afforded by allowing students to be creative.

One of the projects this year that I’ve been discouraged by has been “Traditional Korean Games”. There are a handful of topics organized under the umbrella of this presentation because none of them would have enough material to complete the required presentations. They play games like Yut-Nori (like the board game “Sorry”) and Gonggi (Korean jacks) and explain the rules in English. It’s not exactly the most difficult thing in the class because everyone knows what things mean in Korean, so it takes a lot to impress me when I interview the students.

Anyway, one of the parts of this project is usually “Jegichagi“, which is just a variation of a “Hacky Sack” crossed with some streamers. They game is played the same way, trying to keep the jegi from hitting the ground by kicking it. I’ve done a bit of this before, and I usually volunteer to help students when they play. I like to be able to keep the jegi in the air at least as long as the “teacher” of the hobby.

Today when I went to participate in the game, I failed to calculate the increased difficulty that would be caused by my dress shoes. I was into my second string of kicks when I lost my balance on my heel and slammed my elbow and shoulder onto the concrete in front of the group. The students wanted to approach and help me up as if I was an elderly man that had just fallen on the street or something, but also didn’t want to touch me or embarrass me by offering me assistance. I just started laughing and got up, rubbed myself off, and left the group. “I’ll feel that tomorrow.”

I am a little sore because of it already, and I’m sure I’ll be wincing tomorrow as I finish up grading all 600 projects that I’ve watched for the past month, but that’ll be from all the repetitive strain from the data entry, not just the fall. (Shudder)

[The Daily What]

Although I am interested in the ideas behind Transhumanism, one of the inevitable consequences of trying to become “more than human” is the modification process. The eventual merging of man and machine into a cyborg, not quite human, not quite machine mash-up that takes the strengths of both to accelerate mankind’s progress another step.

While things like Google Glass are awesome, (seriously, I’d gargoyle them in public, send me a pair), permanent body modification isn’t something I’ve ever considered. Outside of dental work, I have no tattoos, no piercings, and no desire for any decorative modification of any kind. I hate having my hair cut distinctively, so it’s not likely that I’m going to have a tattoo mark me permanently. That’s just how I am. I’m not saying it’ll never happen, but I can’t imagine what I’d ever think would be suitable for me.

This guy in the video got his arm modified because he wanted to attach an iPod Nano to his arm without wearing a wristband. Getting your arm modified to serve as a base for a product that is modified NEARLY EVERY YEAR, with a PROPRIETARY OPERATOR that might not allow future models in the same form factor is extremely shortsighted, let alone the fact that simple solutions exist to attach such a device to your arm. Telling someone with extensive tattoos that reach onto the neck and near the face that they should think about long term consequences because they might be making a poor decision probably won’t have much of an effect.

Besides, who the hell needs an iPod Nano for anything? Aren’t phones small enough to be carried and hold plenty of music? They are plenty of ways to listen to music easily enough, and none of them involve surgery. An iPod Nano doesn’t even connect to the Internet without a cable running to a computer. It’s basically a pretty interface for a flash drive with some offline apps, and you’d need another accessory to make it work wirelessly with headphones since having a wire running down your arm would look silly if you can’t even handle a wrist strap.

I have to admit, an iPod Nano is a little better than wearing a watch, which I do, but if I want to wear my watch all day it’s a little less traumatic and has a lower chance of infection. Theoretically, body modification to enhance functional man-machine interfaces is something I support being a geek, but seeing this in person doesn’t make me want to reach for sub-dermal piercing or strong magnets to modify myself to prepare for the future. I think I’ll make do with my pocket for my phone, and if I do decide to go under the knife, it’s going to be for something a hell of a lot better than an iPod Nano.

If all the people that are heavily into body modification are the people that turn into cyborgs, it isn’t going to be the future I anticipated living in.

One of the things I enjoy about playing Magic is the deck building aspect. I love crafting a plan around several cards, weighing the probability of the outcomes involving those cards, then putting myself into a position where I can achieve what I need to make those cards work to win the game. Usually there is a slow evolution, where I get an initial spark for an idea, look for the cards I need to complete the idea, fail to achieve those goals because I lack certain cards, then end up with an unwieldy monstrosity that does 90% of what I want it to do, but falls short at a critical point. I also tend to lose, a lot, but that’s okay. I came up with the idea, I make the decisions, and when I win, it makes it all the worthwhile. I am a “Johnny” player, which means the card interactions entertain me more than the actual “winning” aspect.

I scavenged through three different decks last night when I got a message that the person responsible for getting me into EDH was looking to play some 1 vs 1 games with me. His schedule prevents us from meeting normally, so being able to set aside time to meet and play was a priority since I don’t get to see him all that often. I wanted to have a special deck ready for him to try out, so instead of trying to incrementally improve a deck I already had, I decided to blow up three decks, pick all the best cards, work around a single, very tight theme, and see if I could make a deck that could beat one of his, even once. I usually get blown out whenever I make a new deck, but I wanted to get a win with a new deck right away.

I was working on my deck last night, talking to my wife before bed while she caught me up with all the social goings on of the neighborhood, which was good, but I ended up spending over an hour or more picking cards and finally finishing my deck. I was happy with the results, but was worried when he told me some of his decks had “new toys”. His stuff is really, really fun to play against, and isn’t as cutthroat as some of the other people in the playgroup, but can pull off some arcane combinations of cards that can make your head hurt.

I won my first game with my new deck very convincingly, held off his far and away best deck for a pretty long time, then switched decks and played one of my scavenged and soon to be reinvented decks and lost handily. My move to take a fresh approach to my deck paid off, and I’m going to take steps to revitalize all my other decks. I also made a huge, multi-card trade that will end up changing several of my decks completely, all for the better. It made the winning deck today even better, and made several other decks more likely to be played more competitively in different settings.

It’s good to be able to go from “concept phase” to “playable deck” without months of losing for a change.

I might be a little behind the curve in discovering Spaced, as it’s over a decade old, but I’ve really been enjoying this series. Besides the typical office fare that everyone watches, I discovered Spaced about a week ago and have made it through the first season. This is a rare sitcom I can tolerate.

Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg are two of the primary people involved in Spaced, and are also on Doug Loves Movies from time to time. They are very likable guys, and I like their work. I loved Shaun of the Dead, and this series definitely predates that but has a similar sense of humor. In some ways, this is a lot like “Clerks”, the series, with a group of slackers talking about trivial concerns, but it’s a lot less annoying than other shows that were on at the time like ”Friends”. The comedy still holds up, and because it doesn’t have a laugh track it is a lot more watchable. There are tons of inside jokes, Easter eggs in the scenes, and shout outs to geek culture. It’s something I wished I knew about at the time it was airing, but that was before things like “The Internet” and “Streaming Video” were practical.

Add this to the growing list of BBC programming (?) I enjoy: Spaced, Doctor Who, Sherlock, Qi.

I only watch a handful of American shows these days:  Community (NBC), Mad Men (AMC), The Walking Dead (AMC), Breaking Bad (AMC), and Game of Thrones (HBO).

Any recommendations from readers?

I sat down today, looked at my schedule and realized, “Whoa, next week I have a five day university free teaching holiday? I need to sort this out, I might be able to actually go somewhere and take a trip with my family for a change.”

This is the part of the semester that gets really tricky. There are five different classes which meet on the same days each week, but when you have holidays thrown into the mix that fall on different days close to the end of the semester you need to be careful. You have to start making sure all of the schedules keep aligned, otherwise there will be too much work to do at once. I printed out a set of calendars and went to work figuring out what I’ll be doing for the rest of the semester. I find mapping each day with class numbers, then seeing where things become duplicated, or double up helps me visualize when I need to plan my schedule best.

I’ll go longer this year than I ever have before, pushing into the final week of classes. I usually have grades done a week early, but not this year. I don’t finish giving exams until the final day, and I’ll be interviewing more students this year than any other.  There are more students this semester in danger of failing my class than ever before. If these students impress me during their interviews, I’ll have easily a dozen students that will have saved themselves from failing my class. I don’t expect many miracles this semester. There are a few people that might actually fail on their actual grades instead of attendance which I have no control over. I always agonize over failing poor English speakers that try hard and attend class, but with the grades I’ve seen this semester, most of them have resigned themselves to failure.

In every class, I’ve set aside three days for interviews for maximum time to give to every group. It will give me the time I need to see all of my students since my classes are 20% larger this year, but my patience and ability to stay sane during long interview days isn’t. I want everyone to have the chance they need to prove that they’ve learned a lot. I also really hate sitting through boring interviews, so I might need to work in new rules when I explain the interview procedures. I need to reserve the right to call off an interview that is terrible this semester to spare me the uncomfortable seven minutes of silence if a students can’t speak a word of English. I hate putting people on the spot, but if I’m going to need to sit through 15+ hours of interviews, they better be good.

I now have “the plan” sitting on my desk, where everything works out symmetrically. All the classes have exactly the same opportunities, lessons, and materials before the finals begin and it is up to them to follow through. I have too much of a obsessive, controlling element to let one class get ahead and throw everything out of alignment. I hate the paperwork and all the grading, but finishing a semester is extremely satisfying.

Chuck and Beans

I hook up the Wii, and my daughter instantly has taken a shining to Super Mario Galaxy. She has watched me sit through the cutscenes twice, (I didn’t know I needed to wait 15 minutes to save! ARGH! Why design a game like this?!) and was very excited when I put a Wii remote in her hand and let her waggle it at the screen. When she occasionally does get the icon to touch something, she is ecstatic. “I DID IT!” she’ll chant, which I do nothing to discourage. She’s my new gaming buddy.

Of course, now whenever she and I have time to spend together, she suggests that I play Wii with her. We have an arrangement, where she’s not allowed to ask about the game before bed, or if she hasn’t eaten her meals, but if she’s met these basic requirements and hasn’t watched television earlier in the day, we can play for a level or so before we need to turn it off. It’s pretty cool to sit around and have he watching the action, which is something my wife can’t do because it causes her serious headaches.

I don’t want my daughter to lack an attention span, or play games all day on her own, but she’ll inherit my old Game Boy Advance, and then my Wii and Nintendo DS, then she’ll eventually be gaming on the PC and her phone, I imagine, if she isn’t into other things by then. The idea of a daughter that enjoys gaming terrifies my wife, since she is against all forms of fun, and prefers more practical pursuits in her free time. I think a balance between the staunch seriousness of my wife, and my own feelings of “GAMES ARE FUN” is probably the sweet spot. Tomorrow we’ve already set aside time for the first level of the game, so I have to make sure that she’s well behaved and fed so that she’s allowed to play with me.

Now that my new monitor can double as a television, I went into my stockpile of old console accessories and dug out my Wii to hook up. The Wii has been gathering dust since my daughter was born. I haven’t been around the house in extended stints to dedicate time to playing it, and buying games that run on an American Wii turned into such a prohibitive hassle that I gave up on it entirely. Owning a region locked console is a mistake I will never make again. I also skipped on buying the Nintendo DSi, and Nintendo 3DS because of region locking, and I’ll never purchase another handheld device because my phone can entertain me well enough on the go that dedicated gaming devices are completely obsolete ideas and could never be justified at their exorbitant price. The technology has passed them by, and I can always justify upgrading my phone, but I can’t see purchasing a 300 dollar dedicated device with 30 dollar games.

Having hooked up the Wii, which maxes out at 480i, and trying to play on an HD device made me fully aware of why building for the last generation of televisions is a bad idea. Games are rough to look at when you have the time to notice the rough edges of things. The Wii remote also doesn’t function nearly as well as a pointing device as I remembered it to, and there aren’t enough benefits to the controller in most games. When things were done well, they are fantastic, when it is poorly implemented, it’s the worst.

Having dusted off the Wii after three years, Super Smash Brothers Brawl, the reason I bought the game system in the first place, didn’t come back to me. It isn’t like riding a bicycle. Trying to figure out the control schemes, the moves, and all the quirky power-ups left me unable to play at a competent level. I think I’m completely done with the twitch based gaming scene. Give me something I can contemplate, or that is swift and turn based any day, I’ll no longer spend my time remembering what all fifty buttons combinations do as I try to play a game.

It’s not that I miss playing video games, but it was a significant part of my life for a long time. I just don’t do it anymore. I do different things at the moment in my free time, and there aren’t many dedicated console games I could imagine ever desiring enough to sit down and play for a long time. If I’m getting together with friends to play, I want to do something else, and if I’m alone, I have other things I can be doing that occupy my time equally. If you would have asked me if that’s what I would have expected my response about video games would be at this time of my life a few years ago, I think I would have been shocked.

Things change, and my newly hooked up Wii is proof that things sometimes get left behind.

If you are like me,  you want to practice a foreign language, but can’t always find the time to study intensely. Finding a passive way to study would help me to pick up words, even when busy. Is there a passive way to study? I’m going to try Language Immersion for Chrome for a few days to see if it helps me. If I install this on my browser while I surf the web for news, I’m sure I’ll pick up the occasional word which might help me improve. It’s not tough to get exposed to more vocabulary, although the grammar will still remain hard to improve without dedicated learning. It’s certainly not going to build conversational fluency or help you speak, but if you want to learn the occasional vocabulary word and don’t mind a machine mis-translation, it’s fine. I also like the gradient available that means that people of different levels can still use the application. It also can be turned off easily, which means if you are busy or need precise information it won’t stand in your way.

I think this is an awesome tool for light studying, and if it gets me in the habit of picking up a Korean textbook for a change, it might be very good for me.

I’ve been doing activities related to movies for my classes, and one of the challenges is for the students to prepare riddles and clues for one another to see if they can guess each other’s movie choices. It takes a little time for the students to pick a suitably difficult movie. I tell students not to pick things with obvious clues, “This is a movie that takes place on the Titanic” would be better as, “This is a tragic love story on a boat” or something a little less obvious. Some students pick foreign language films, or pick things and choose Korean films with less popular actors. They might stump me nine times out of ten whenever they pick a romantic comedy, but usually someone in the class has seen the movies I haven’t watched.

One of the better exchanges I heard as students tried to stump each other was the following:

Group A: “This is a movie with an actor from the movie The Avengers.”

Group B: “What is the actor’s name?”

Group A: “Chris something. Chris Hamsauce?”

Group B: “THOR!”

Me: ?!

Another group of students was persistent with their suggestion that I should add “Adult” to the movie genre list. To humor them, I added it to the list, and was waiting to get a little revenge for trying to embarrass me. One of the other groups had selected the movie “House of Wax”, which I knew, but wanted them to write better clues before they shared it with the group. When it was this group’s turn to try to stump their classmates, this was the exchange:

Group A: “Our movie takes place in a strange town where the local art museum has installations made from actually living creatures. Chad Michael Murray is in it.”

Entire class: “Who is in it? We don’t know that person.”

Me: “The most famous person was probably Paris Hilton.  Just say Paris Hilton was in the movie.”

Perverted Group: “PARIS HILTON IS IN THIS MOVIE!?”

Me: “No, It’s NOT an ADULT MOVIE! It’s ANOTHER Paris Hilton movie.”

The scarlet face of the students that wanted to add “Adult Movie”, and the howling laughter of the entire class was very satisfying. ZING!