::A Geek in Korea::

My first attempt at going over my syllabus in my introductory college level course for my university did not inspire a great deal of confidence. Last year when I gave my students a syllabus for the higher level course, I was able to have conversations with a lot higher level of confidence of being understood. Now that I am teaching level one, the beginner level, I have twenty wide-eye stares of people that seem to want to bolt for the registrar and look for another teacher. It is going to be a really significant problem to get over this difference in ability.

A few weeks ago I went through all my materials and simplified everything. I don’t write in a complicated style for students to begin with, but I decided that I needed to be more concise and use simple tenses and verbs. Present tense whenever possible. Positive statements. No idioms. I eliminated any compound sentences, and I used common verbs that students that studied English from elementary school should know. I have lots of ways to organize my materials, but I went for a simple, straightforward style with bullet points and a few rules. I’d introduce a rule, then have a short three or four sentence paragraph with clear reasons behind how I would enforce this rule. I’d pause after two sentences, state the idea another way, write on the board, then continue on when I thought that I had exhausted the point.

I have a tendency to speak pretty quickly on my first day of a new class because of nerves. I hate that awkward silence where no one is comfortable speaking. I am aware of this, so I intentionally tried to slow down. I took long pauses after I introduced a topic, drinking water and asking for any follow up questions. Last semester, I went through the entire syllabus and the explanation of what we were going to do class by class, and it took around forty minutes. I spent the rest of the time going over any personal questions the students have about me, had a few little conversations with higher level students who were showing off by asking questions, and let them go after an hour.

Today, I went over only my syllabus and it took an hour. I slowed my speaking down and covered the materials as clearly as I could, yet I still got no responses from the students. I don’t know if any student in the class could understand anything I was saying.

I took attendance, then opened up the class to asking me a few questions about myself. The first question was, of course, “How old are you?”

I used to shrug off this question from children. They don’t know any better than to ask it to everyone. Their lives are spent hashing out who is older and younger. They want to know who will spent time making them feel like shit, and who they can talk down to in a condescending way without getting in trouble. It’s not that I am sensitive about my age in Korea. I’m older than all of my university students, so I don’t need to worry about some ageist patronizing bullshit, but if students in university really still don’t know it is rude to ask people about their age before any other single thing to a complete stranger, I have a long, hard road ahead of me.

At least that student asked me something. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little worried about this semester…I hope my classes tomorrow are a little better.

Walking the dog today, we saw a wall of water slowly approaching from the west. I thought that if I headed back early enough we would beat the storm to our home. I timed it wrong.

Unfortunately, Yoshi and I got caught in the middle of the thunderstorm. We went from walking on the edge of the sunny, bright blue sky to being under assault. We found cover in a playground that had a shelter area. I knew of this place because I had gotten stuck there once before when it started to rain. This time was a lot worse. I had to hold Yoshi while the water slowly filled up the area over the course of a thirty minutes of strong, windy rain. Eventually I was standing on a bench while the water rose over the height of my shoes on the ground. Once the rain let up, I walked back home with Yoshi. This wasn’t even a typhoon related storm as far as I know. This was the raining season throwing a quick thunderstorm at the city to keep people on their toes.

Tomorrow will be the first class of the semester. There is a typhoon that is going to be really close to Daejeon all week dumping water on the city. Earlier they were projecting that it could actually hit Daejeon according to my wife. I’ve been through enough near misses that I really don’t want to see what a typhoon hitting directly will be like.

I wonder what attendance will be like if the typhoon hits during class time? Class won’t be canceled. I wonder who is dedicated enough to show up in a typhoon on their first day of class.

There wasn’t really a concept of a fashion “season” when I grew up. We’d buy clothes at the beginning of school, then get some stuff for Christmas holidays.  Whatever wasn’t run through with holes or too small became our new spring clothing, and any clothes our cousins could no longer fit into were the clothes my brother and I destroyed during summer. When I got finished with something, my brother wore it. Then the next set of cousins or friends with suitable children would inherit anything left after my brother and I got done wearing it.

My wife went out to a department store last week and found some end of season discounts. Things move swiftly here, unlike where I grew up in rural Ohio. You can’t just walk into a store at any point of time and expect to see the same deals or the same types of clothing. The bargain bin is hardly a thing to count on when looking for deals. When stores get a new set of clothes they need to move them. They are at least two seasons ahead. There are trends and campaigns in children’s clothes, like adult clothes from designer labels. The prices reflex all of this.

Anything in Korea that needs to be sold to children has at least a 200~300% mark up compared to what it would cost in the United States. I can say that without exaggeration having shopped on things in both Korea and the United States. We picked up a suitcase worth of children’s clothes while on vacation, and that would have been the cost of two designer items in Korea. It’s staggering how expensive everything is, and insane that parents spend that much money on items to make kids look like little versions of themselves. All we wanted were a few items my wife had saw on sale a few days earlier, but it was not to be.

We were looking at things that were on sale, and they had completely priced us out of our price range with a t-shirt. The sale had ended, so it was back to $150 cardigans for toddlers, $40 t-shirts for little kids, and $100 mini-skirts for children that can barely walk. I wonder if the people that buy this are so flush with cash that they simple don’t know what else to spend their money on? After you have your huge apartment, nice car, and spend money on a kid’s education, everything else is money to burn, right? These people want to spend money on this stuff to look good. That’s how petty their life must be. I don’t envy someone that feels the need to spend that much money on clothes so that they can fit in with some play group.

It’s still warm and stormy. Despite being in the rainy season of summer, late fall clothes are occupying all the prominent stores. Most kids are growing, so it’s a little difficult to buy clothes three months in advance for small children. We missed their sale by a few days, so what we were looking for has already been shipped off to the lower tier fashion department stores that sell things from the previous seasons at a steep discount. In a few weeks this stuff will end up being for sale at the places we normally shop.

We found some items that were out of season and nice looking for a budget a block away from the department store. If we wanted to buy a lot of stuff, we would have started looking at the discount places to begin with. They recycle clothing by dropping it in big green metal boxes next to dumpsters. Those clothes get shipped off to other countries, or burned. It’s not like you can find second hand baby clothing shops anywhere. The baby that had been supplying Glow with clothes left for another country with her parents, and we don’t have any close friends with children of the appropriate size. Glow is also tall enough to be confused for a girl two or three times her age, so we’ve got to keep up with clothes more than the average parent with a small child.

Korea’s low birth rate has complex social and cultural consequences, but I can’t imagine the high price of simple things while raising a kid is going to increase the birth rate any time soon. Children’s education is criminally overpriced (and from a teacher that’s been on the receiving end of that money, I know it is true), and even things like lotion or toys are substantially more expensive. If they aren’t expensive, they are cheap, dangerous products from China you shouldn’t be touching, let alone letting your child play with. We’re relatively lucky, as we can get to the United States to shop, or have my parents send care packages of different things we need. I can’t imagine what a working class Korean family does to make ends meet if they try to make their children a priority here. There are small things, like a subsidy for child day care services that even we take advantage of, but there are a lot of kids that won’t reach their potential simply because they will be priced out of achieving it.

Last semester, the last four weeks of class were ridiculous because there were several holidays that landed in the middle of the busiest part of the semester. There were national holidays and university celebrations for several days. Some of my classes didn’t see me for an entire week of class. You had to plan far in advance, and usually the events that are local don’t show up on any calendar in the office. You just have to know about it from someone else. Technically there is a policy of makeup days, where you spend extra time during a week with the same students to make up for any class you miss that is canceled or rescheduled. This is never actually possible to do, because everyone’e schedule is different and no one can stay after for an hour when you have another class in a block one after another. Instead, I was told to pick days we already have class and simply count that twice in the attendance. Other than setting up a night class, there is nothing else anyone could possibly do about it.

This semester started off with a rescheduling bomb. Only a few days before we were supposed to start teaching, we found out that everyone’s assumption about when the semester actually started was wrong! We didn’t start on a Monday, but a Wednesday! The materials I was struggling to create for my second class this week weren’t needed, because I will only see one of my classes twice this coming week. I’ll simply pick out some “getting to know you” materials and let the class fill out their student information forms in class.

I thought if that was a simple enough change to make now, I should look at the rest of the semester to see if any holidays fall during the week. If I plan for it now, I won’t be surprised and be forced to reschedule things later on. I spent two weeks trying to figure out how to move around all my materials in the time I had left. If I do that before the semester starts, any changes I make will be much easier. I looked at the calendar…there isn’t a single holiday during the rest of the semester except a week for Korean Thanksgiving.

Other than a week off during the first month of the semester, there isn’t another weekday vacation day any time this semester! That makes it easy to find time, and to teach more materials, but it also is a major issue for burn out. I don’t get vacation immediately after the semester ends either. I have a late evening class all the way into my normal vacation time. My final class this semester ends around Christmas Eve. That is a long time off.

This summer vacation has been wonderful. I got to spend time with my family, and help around the house. I’m interested in what the next semester might hold for me, but right now I’m happy I have two more days to enjoy some time off.

Since my campaign got started up a week ago, I’ve been running through a series of homebrew solutions for gaming. Dungeons and Dragons might not be Warhammer 40k, but there is some preparation involved in making a game run smoothly by finding ways to represent characters and players in an efficient, and importantly for me, cheap, manner. I think I’ve finally found an adequate solution to how I will be representing the features of the terrain, players, and the monsters from now on.

The first game we played at someone’s house. They had a grid on a white board, which was really nice, but it was the wrong scale. The game maps had to be adjusted to work on the board, or you’d have to go room by room and redraw everything twice as large. It was a little difficult to transport this board anywhere too, so we would only be able to play at their place. It wasn’t portable, and while it was adaptable, I wanted to see if I could do better without spending too much.

The first thing I tried to do was make my own tiles. Dungeons and Dragons have official tiles that are sold based on themes and come in a book. You punch out these tiles and use them. You need multiple books, and multiple copies of books if you want to make large dungeons. I found free, legal sources of tiles online, then went about trying to find materials to make them. I had a friend do this with some foam boards and expensive color printing. He made some awesome sets, totally in scale and beautifully made, but they are of limited use. He had one theme, dank blue dungeon. If you didn’t want to run something in a dank, blue dungeon, you were going to need to make new tiles.

I tried to make some of my own dungeon tiles. I decided to use some hard board, like tough cardboard, and some things I printed out on a copier. The ink started to smear, cutting out things to make them fit together was difficult, and trying to coat them so they wouldn’t get damaged proved problematic. My first attempted at covering tiles was done with scotch tape and some clear packing tape. This became a bubbling mess. Once placed, it couldn’t be repaired either. That idea went nowhere. I scrapped the idea after only using half of one sheet of hardboard. I’ll keep the hardboard around when I need to make 3-d map elements or something, but as a replacement for store bought or foam tiles it was useless.

Next I tried paper maps that would be laminated. They would be portable, and easy to store. They could also, theoretically, be made in advance for every encounter to make each fight unique. I don’t have a lamination machine, so I bought some giant sheets of plastic coating that claimed you could protect pictures without the need of a lamination machine. This was no joke. It was “A3″ sized paper meant to protect a giant photo. This is for protecting things the size of two sheets of normal copier paper side by side. I bought some A3 sized paper, went in to use the copier at work, and printed out something to see how well these lamination sheets would work. Once I got it printed successfully at the right scale, I tried to do a double sided sheet stuck between the lamination paper.

You know how when you buy a screen protector for your phone, it comes with a sticky sheet and a stiff sheet that is somewhat tacky? You know how hard it is to apply that to a small screen without bubbles or messing it up? Now imagine that process made fifty times harder because of the surface area that has been increased by around twenty times. I learned that If you don’t cut the paper down to smaller dimensions, the A3 paper was too big and didn’t let the static part stick to the sticky part. I’m still not sure if I am supposed to remove the two static parts and only use the sticky parts or what. There weren’t any real instructions or anything I could figure out. After failing once at this a few times, I got a reasonably good sheet to stick together, but it wasn’t ideal. There were bubbles, and the designed couldn’t be swapped out. Once you made a map, you’d have to use it the way it was because writing on the laminated sheet with a dry erase marker didn’t work well.

Defeated, I gave up. I was just going to use my giant A3 paper I had for each battle and just toss it after each game. If I needed to draw on it I’d just not reuse it later on and print out some more. I would just keep my eye open for a way to make a reusable battle map in the future and leave it alone. I had too many attempts and too many failures clouding up my vision of what I needed to do.

Back when I first got into D&D, I found these little hard plastic cases for individual pieces of paper. You’d slip the paper between the plastic, then you could use a dry erase marker on them without needing to erase it with a rag or eraser. It was great for tracking initiative or hit points on a character sheet. I have two for small B5 sized paper. Stationary stores sell them for students, and they come in various sizes. I thought about looking at a stationary store to see if I could come up with something to replace my previous attempts today, and I struck gold. I went to the store where I purchased my original cases and was in luck! There were A3 sized hard paper cases! I had A3 paper! I could simply print off a map and slip it between cases, or buy multiple cases and put them together for a large battle map. I bought two, which makes approximately a 60 cm x 84 cm battle map. (Yes, I went metric long ago.) Since it is modular, I could continue to add different sized sheets too, but right now it is as big as the whiteboard we started with and a lot more flexible. I think I reached my goal.

All I needed was for the image on the paper to have a grid marking twenty five millimeter squares and I could even use Dungeons and Dragon miniatures to represent characters in battle. Since I can draw on these paper cases with dry erase markers, I just used some graph paper I made from the Internet for a generic battle map. Now all I need to do is find a nice set of thin and fat color dry erase markers and I’ll be set. Erasable, portable, adaptable, and cheap. It’s perfect for my needs.

Since I won’t be buying miniatures, my next goal is to find cheap ways to represent players. I’ve been using Tokentool, which lets you create small tokens that are easy to print out at the right scale. Then I drop them onto a sheet and print out a bunch of them. Since I like a variety of monsters, I don’t even bother doing anything but printing and cutting them out. I could be using the hardboard to make chips or tokens, but I haven’t had them fight off the same creature twice yet. I also have small metal clips that can hold the pictures of the creatures, but this hasn’t worked out since it isn’t viewable at all angles. Right now simple paper printouts represent the monsters in the campaign.

The players started using dice to represent their characters last game, which was fine. Once conditions started stacking up, I wish we had some actual miniatures to denote who was who, because it got a little busy on the board with the abstractions. I have small glass pebbles for marking creatures, but bloodied conditions, or vulnerabilities needed to be noted by hand. If I can find a hobby store with different colored stones or pipe cleaners with the right colors, I might be able to make the current marking system work. If I get a colorful set of markers I’ll be able to note it on the board as a temporary fix. I’m pretty happy with my homebrew solutions now. There are some things I could print off from the Internet and incorporate, and I’ve already decided to work on a homebrew “achievement” system for players that feel they’ve accomplished something without needing lots of magic items.

This is all after I was a Dungeon Master for two games. TWO. We are still trying to nail down specifics about the frequency we want to play and where to meet, and I’ve already gone batshit crazy trying to find out how to represent the perfect game table on a budget. This is why I don’t do well on vacation. Without something to focus my attentions, like work, I’ll just get more and more focused on the minutiae of my hobbies and slowly go crazy.

View of the solar system showing the locations of all the asteroids starting in 1980, as asteroids are discovered they are added to the map and highlighted white so you can pick out the new ones.
The final color of an asteroids indicates how closely it comes to the inner solar system.

Earth Crossers are Red
Earth Approachers (Perihelion less than 1.3AU) are Yellow
All Others are Green

 

After all the kid wrangling, doctors appointments, dog walking, shopping and visits by my Korean Mother-in-law were over for today, I had a window of time where I was supposed to go into my computer room office and get down to work. I had the whole house to myself, Yoshi was out on the veranda, and all I needed to do was sit down and work for a few hours to prepare something to do next semester for any lessons I could brainstorm an activity to use in class. I was working and thinking about different things, of course, because I was still at home. Dishes that needed to be washed. Toys that needed to be put away. Drinks and snacks that needed to be eaten. It was rather ridiculous that I had all this time, but it was going to waste because I had to find space on my desk to open up the materials and start planning.

Last semester I went to work and sat for a few hours cleaning out my desk. It was cathartic. A new start to a new semester. I put together a six week lesson plan in an afternoon just running through old stuff I had used and finding space for all the ideas I had collected during my previous semester. An empty office at work with time to be productive is great for me. I can take over the copy machine. I can go through my drawers and find anything I need. I can make a mess, briefly, and not apologize. I don’t need to make small talk. I don’t need to answer people’s questions, or chat. It’s all work.

I didn’t even have music on, or use the web for anything distracting. I was all work. I went through a series of books and found all the materials I could use in my lessons for the entire semester. If I weren’t so foolish ambitious I could simply hand out what I had and be covered for every lesson where I had to fill time when the book ran short. There are a few specialized lessons that everyone does that I need to prepare my own version, or find a copy of what everyone else does and see if it works for my classes. I’ve also got to get samples for the forms and elements they use for the project I inherited this semester. A lot of my material is going to be recycled and refined instead of pioneering new materials for projects.

I’m hesitant to get any more detailed work ready for the semester until I can see the relative difference between my new lower level classes and what I am used to teaching. This week I went through around twenty revisions of my syllabus, removing hard words and making it as simple as possible. It is two pages of class rules and a lot of simple words. I think I’ll spend the first class going over it, and the second reenacting the rules with puppets if it doesn’t go over well. Other than that, I got a lot of work done. I have 12 weeks of materials, and I probably only need to spend an hour or two on each of them to get them ready. Considering that I spent dozens of hours preparing lessons last semester, I’m feeling either very cocky, or a lot more relaxed.

The D&D campaign I started on Saturday had it’s second game. YES! Players that are interested in a game I enjoy! People who have a hobby and want to spend time together making time for one another. People who trust me to present them with interesting situations, and enjoy trying to share a story telling experience with me. All of these things are awesome. All the investment I’ve made into the world of D&D’s story telling techniques, following the D&D subcultures on the Internet, and generally geeking out about the game for the past few years has resulted in an opportunity to play it at a table again. I’m very pleased by this turn of events.

I set up a reservation at a room that had air conditioning, was close to the majority of players, and had an unlimited drink service. Needs met. I even had a series of coupons so we’d play cheaply. Perfect. Everyone was prompt, and ready to play. I had prepared a battle map from scratch, and set up the scenario throughout the week with a daily email explaining how they are being perceived by the people in the keep that serves as the local base of operations for this group of adventurers. The group had to navigate through the alliances and the different factions to eek out a living for themselves. Right now they are item starved, low level characters just trying to hang on until they reach the next level.

I’m enjoying the brutal combat encounters I can manage without too many tricks simply because the character’s don’t have the ridiculous number of magical items, spells, feats, and powers that upper level characters can take advantage of later in the game. Right now, a band of goblins torturing their source for magical items from far away lands will pose a serious threat, but in a few level’s time won’t even be worth the time to describe how they look in combat before they would be brutally slaughter. A bad die roll will fell characters and force desperate decisions.

I like the challenge of being a Dungeon Master. There is a lot of things beyond the mechanics you need to think about. It is mentally draining playing three and a half hours of role playing for me. I have to keep character’s motivations in line, think of adequate challenges, work on the next step of the story, build plot points, remember things from previous games, adjudicate rules, and provide combat challenges. Balancing the needs to tell a story, the time required to tell that story, and making sure it is the story the players want to participate is also important.

I’m pleased that all the players are clever, know their characters, and are up on the mechanics. They don’t shy away from trying to do awesome things either. They are always discussing their options, working as a team, and have a strong tactical presence. They might need me to explain things from time to time, and sometimes they hit a barrier to my understanding of the rules, but as of now they’ve been outstanding. Just today a player sent me a two page background explaining her character’s motivations, and a simple throw away line she made on that sheet with have profound implications for things I am laying the groundwork for levels later. That kind of thing makes the players interested in the possible twists and turns things take, and helps the story become more than the sum of it’s parts.

Right now I don’t even know where I’ll be taking them the next time I see them. I have two weeks to figure it out, which is plenty of time for it to stew in my brain. I have time to think about what might be happening with the characters, the keep they inhabit, and help them level up their characters for the next series of battles. They’ll have more hit points, more surges, and will be more adept at combat, which means I’ll have to be more brutal, more diabolical, and more punishing with my choices of monsters and situations.

In the past, I was so worried about the story, or the rules, that I didn’t enjoy just telling a story to some people. Now that I’ve got a basic idea of how to run a game, I can start to branch out and get more creative with my encounters. It’s great when I slap down a series of creatures on the board and the player’s reaction is, “Oh…really. We’re going to fight….all of them?” and I simply say, “I don’t know yet. Let’s figure out what happens.”… and we do.

Yo Dawg. Spoilers.

My favorite movie of the year so far has been Inception. I had to sneak out after work and see a late night showing because I was so excited to see it. I came back home and raved about it to my wife for an hour. I told her I really wanted to watch it with her, but we’d have to figure out how to get a babysitter to make it happen. If I couldn’t see it again, I wanted her to see it before it disappeared from the theater. Now that our daughter spends a few hours at a child care service in our apartment block, there is a short window of time where we aren’t walking around cleaning up and chasing her from one disaster to the next.

My wife said she wanted to go out and see a movie. Inception was still playing, and I told her I’d be glad to go see it again. We got up extra early and got Glow ready for the day care center. We didn’t even have time for an actual breakfast before we departed the apartment. We dropped off Glow and ran to the theater. The seating policy at the movie theater is that you can’t buy tickets with less than 10 minutes to go before the movie started. We jumped in a cab to travel the four blocks we needed to traverse in the five minutes we had before the deadline and luckily caught the elevator right as it arrived. We got there just in time.

Breakfast was some nasty orange drink and some caramel popcorn. I watched the movie again for clues, and I think I felt satisfied in one of the more optimistic interpretations of the film. For people that came to an opposite conclusion, I’d like to have a long sit down conversation while playing the DVD and drinking beer to see their point of view. There is a lot of symbolism and poignant lines that I know either interpretation of the film will ignore to support their opinion.

The story was easier to follow this time, and I still was amazed by the special effects. The film projector was slightly out of focus, which gave me a headache. The score, which I failed to mention last time, makes the film feel so much more epic. The characterizations of the majority of the heist members is still flawed, but I think that could be explained away with some of the symbolism of what those characters might actually be about. I don’t know…I still really enjoyed the film, and it’s the first movie I’ve seen twice in the theater in a really long time.

Scrabble on the go is a pretty intriguing concept. There are iPhone applications that do this, but finding the equivalent Android application wasn’t something I was looking for until I stumbled upon a thread of players raving about WordFeud. I signed up in the thread (Username: Torgodevil ) and waited for someone to challenge me to a game. I eventually just started a new game with a random challenger. I now have four games going on simultaneously with people from all around the world that I drop letters into at any particular time. It takes a few minutes a day to keep up with, so anyone can find time to play.

Whenever it is your turn, you get a notification. That is, as long as you turn on that feature. Otherwise it is up to you to log in from time to time to check to see if it is your turn.  Then you simply use the letter tiles at the bottom of the screen and place them on the board. There is no “challenge” feature, or the ability to bluff words that aren’t in a dictionary, which is for the best. I’m not a Word Freak. There is no penalty for spamming words that might not be legal either, so you can simply place tiles in the highest scoring position and hope for the best.

This game is good, simple, well executed, and fun.

Now if Scrabble with people over the Internet isn’t your thing, but you still like word puzzles, check out Shortyz. This application was one of the first things I installed on my phone, but months ago it had a terrible, unusable interface. Now all the navigation and word entering is done on the device as you look at the puzzle. It has a greatly improved user interface, and made the crossword experience much more pleasant. You can have it alert you to errors, reveal spaces by letter or by word, it keeps track of your time, and collects dozens of crosswords from multiple sources. Trying to go back to doing a pen and paper crossword feels limiting because there is no way to check for errors or get feedback about your responses that might cause you to stop the puzzle in frustration. This application went from something I installed and tried to use that I took off my phone in disgust, to one of the best wastes of time on my phone. I love it.

Does anyone else know any good word puzzle games for the Android platform?