::A Geek in Korea::

There had a bit of a debate about what was going to happen once our current set of adventures got run through in D&D. It’s one of the existential geek moments. We could continue doing what we’ve been doing, or we could start over and do something legitimately different and challenging. We’ve been playing once or twice every month if we are lucky, so it was going to be months before we needed to worry about finishing the current batch of adventures up.

A few weeks ago I mentioned I was adapting the novel Hyperion into an epic multi-session game that was going to wrap up a lot of loose ends and set forth some epic politics that would change the game world. It didn’t start out that way, but when I started building the storyboards I came up with an long winded plot that basically explains one of the villains in the story’s motivations throughout our entire set of quests.

In my final quest there is time travel involved that will make the characters of the Sarah Connor Chronicles head’s spin, and it’s much more complex and involved than my last attempt at DM’ing. In fact, I’ve got nearly fifteen pages of notes, with multiple time lines, character motivations, and all sorts of other facts about the world I’m attempting to build. I’m taking NOTES about a fictional world. I’m trying to make a world where all the different groups struggling for dominance have real motivations for their actions that remain consistent, and it’s a lot harder than plopping a few monsters down and say, “Fight!” I’ve been running through scenarios in my head in my free time, picking up on plot holes and changing the story to better fit my vision. It’s kinda scary, but I have this idea that’s got hold of me.

In the mean time, while I was working on this, one of the players put forth the idea of moving to the recently released D&D 4.0 edition, or another more updated RPG system. We didn’t want to move on to this new system until we worked out a way to either finish up the story with our current characters, or could convert to a new system and work our characters into the new mechanics.

There were two choices: Either we go with Pathfinder, which was an adaption of the 3.5 rules to a more streamlined idea, or start from scratch in D&D 4.0. I advanced the idea of 4.0, despite the fact that I had started planning my adventure for very high level characters and wouldn’t be able to use it if we switched over until much later.

My enthusiasm for checking out the new books helped pushed everyone on the fence over to getting their hands on the core rule books. Through some community money pooling action we now have a copy of the core rule books in the group, so now we can see what the fuss is about. After looking over the 4.0 rules and changes, we’ve decided that after we finish up our current batch of planned adventures, we’ll switch over to the new system. We’re walking away from the old books and starting fresh. People are atwitter about the changes and want to throw impromtu test runs of the new mechanics just to try them out. It’s infectious enthusism, and really, really nerdy.

This means I’m slated to be the last person to DM the current batch of characters. I get to use my story arc, and then we get new characters. This came about because I had planned my stuff so far in advance, and that I had thought to wrap up the politics in the overarching story with my plot. I did this out of necessity, because plotting stuff out comes in flashes for me. If I don’t take my time I’ll end up with an incomplete idea. I had made a mistake or two by throwing in a few characters without plotting their mission in my last encounter, and it struck me as a mistake. No more!

Now I’ll be the guy putting the final touches on the entire world before we move on. I can kill of characters, set the world on fire, and all of it will play out like I say, because we’re moving on and they can’t do much about it. They actually decided to entrust this without me bringing it up. I told them I was working on an idea and the group said, “Fantastic, We want to hear your final take on this world. We’ll hold off on starting a new game so that you can tell your tale and give us the resolution we’re looking for. Sweetness.”

How badass is that?

I want to do the story so far justice, even if all the work I put into it won’t be built upon since we’re restarting from scratch win D&D 4.0. If I can get across the story I have in mind, and I can end the world in either the two directions, all depending on how well the players do. I’ll be very happy to tell my story last if I can pull it off. I’ve still got a ton of work to do, and I probably won’t even get a chance to start my story for another month at the earliest, so it’s fine even if I haven’t plotted every encounter or worked out how they’re going to beat my big bad. I’m as excited about starting over with a new 4.0 character as I am finishing up the entire story, so it’ll work out for me either way.

I also plotted out my new character when we finally do set up a 4.0 game, and he’ll be a stabby little Halfling Rogue. I’ve got him down on paper, and using the new system to make a character I had a blast! It’s actually FUN to make a character. I’m a hopelessly nerdy dude now, I enjoy making fictional characters and look forward to my chance to level them up. Damn it.

When my wife and I first got an mp3 player for her, the one thing she wanted to transfer over was her copy of the soundtrack to “Mamma Mia“. She loved ABBA and wanted to listen to the English songs over and over. I wasn’t a fan of ABBA, save for Dancing Queen and a few other songs you’d hear in the singing room, but it wasn’t like I was going to have to hear the music on her mp3 player, so why not? It’s one of the few pieces of English music she listens to on a regular basis.

Later, while we were in London, we had a chance to see Mamma Mia on the West End. It was my first real musical as an adult, and my parents paid for the tickets to see the show as a birthday present for her. It was ridiculously expensive to see the show in the heart of London, and we wouldn’t have been able to afford it anyway.

It’s one of our best memories of the trip to Europe we took together too. The whole family loved the show, and we had a great time in the theater. She was bounding with smiles and energy after she saw the musical. The enthusiasm was contagious. I actually liked a lot more of the songs than I realized, and transfered her soundtrack to MY mp3 player to listen to as well. It just makes me smile.

When we saw the trailer for Mamma Mia the movie, I was actually more excited to see it than she was. I have no shame in saying that. I wanted to see the movie to relive the memory of the musical because it was so great. She didn’t want to see it because she thought it wouldn’t be as good as the musical. I insisted we see the movie no matter what she wanted. We found time this weekend to see the movie.

The story is basically unchanged. There were small differences between the musical and the movie, but it was similar enough that you get the experience if you watch the movie. It wasn’t as intimate, and some of the singing wasn’t nearly as good. (Pierce Brosnan, looking at you.)

The most disappointing transistion from musical to film was the chorus line of dancers in swimming flippers during “Lay All Your Love On Me”. In this movie, the flipper scene was a good :20 seconds long, but in the musical it was a hilarious scene, and probably my favorite part of the entire musical.

We both were sitting in the theater nitpicking some of the differences. “This wasn’t in the musical…Oh, he can’t sing well…etc.” Despite this, we both had a good time, and I spent most of the time in the theater smiling. It’s like I’ve heard in reviews. It just leaves everyone smiling. It’s so rare that a movie would put me in a good mood like this one did. I don’t know if I would have enjoyed it as much if I hadn’t seen the musical first though.

My wife got to see the story with Korean subtitles for the first time. She was a bit shocked by the sexual underpinnings of basically EVERY song in the entire feature. She knew the songs, and could sing along, but didn’t really put together what the songs really were implying. She was surprised that she had been missing all of that subtext when she watched the musical. “No, it was all there,” I told her.

I think it’s good she got to see the whole story with subtitles and everything. I enjoyed sitting through the whole thing again with her, and we walked home and talked about our trip to London, the musical, and the movie. It was a good evening.

Chuseok is a time for family. It is also a time for bulk purchase gift sets. So far this year for Chuseok, we aren’t doing too bad as a couple.

My wife started things out by getting a large 15 kilogram box of Korean pears from a single student. These are my absolute favorite fruit. I love eating them in autumn, when they are ripe like apples. Unfortunately, this year Chuseok is extremely early, coming nearly at the heels of summer. The ceremonies for Chuseok require pears for their ancestral worship table, so this fruit gets picked regardless of taste. This year’s pears are getting picked extra early, so they are less sweet. They are still fine to include in dishes like mixed rice, but eating them straight up isn’t as nice.

I got a box of apple wine with two different strengths. It’s potent like soju, but it doesn’t taste bad. It’s like strong sweet apple vinegar that will give you a buzz. It’s delicious and well appreciated.

My wife got the next gift which was…another 15kg box of pears, slightly more ripe. We now have enough pear that I could eat one once a day at work and I’d have fruit into November. It’s absolutely ridiculous. We are using these as gifts this year, since they are expensive, and useful. We already gave some to the new neighbors downstairs.

Today I pulled ahead in shwag, however. I got some man-lotion. Some guy-skin cream. It’s O HUI for Men. Seeing as it’s promoted by BI (RAIN!), it’s probably the most upscale skin care stuff for men available. Makeup and skin care for men is a lot more main stream in Korea than it is in the States. My wife was ecstatic that I now had some upscale lotion to apply after a shower. If it isn’t shaving cream I don’t know what it’s for, I just asked which one I had to put on first so my face didn’t melt or whatever happens when you don’t put toner on before moisterizing.

My box of stuff from the school is sitting in the supply room, so I’ve still got stuff coming my way. I’m desperately hoping that it’s not another box of pears. If it is, I’ll start a fruit stand out by our bus stop and sell them on the street. I can’t eat ANY MORE. I’d love a nice SPAM set, or some premium rice cakes, but I think it’s too upscale for my school.

The National Korean Insurance agency sent me a special letter today. Contained in the envelop were two smaller envelopes with two different plastic bags inside them and a paper ice cream spoon. There were a few pages of Korean that I handed off to the wife, and I went to the restroom. She was reading the Korean instructions and then started laughing. “I know what this is!” she said.

She poked her head into the bathroom and said, “This is for you.”

“What?”

“This envelop is for a stool sample. They want you to fill up the small plastic bag full of your poo. Here, they even gave you a small paper spoon to scoop it for you. Normally, we just…”

“Wait, wait, wait…there is something you NORMALLY do with mail-in stool samples? You’ve done this before?”

“Yes, in the past we just used a newspaper next to the toilet, then moved it with wooden disposable chopsticks. They have these folded paper spoons right in the envelope now to use instead.”

“You…crap…on a newspaper?”

“Where else are you going to do it?” she asked, puzzled.

“Uh, how about in the toilet? Isn’t there some other way they can get this information?!”

“So, you aren’t going to do it then?” she said, somewhat disappointed.

“Are you kidding? Go to the bathroom in an envelope and then MAIL it to someone legally? It sounds like a revenge fantasy come true!”

The Korean government is interested in my shit. Literally. Being an international marriage (Me, an American, and wife, Korean) means that we get lumped into the services provided for all the mail order brides Korean men have taken. This service is to check foreign people with marriage visas from poorer countries that don’t have normal access to health care services. However, since I’m on the list, I get to participate too.

They say it is to increase the comfort of those foreign brides that stay in Korea by providing them with a free check up. Nothing says comfort to me like crapping in a small plastic bag and mailing it back to some strange office. Whoever handles that service’s mail has the new official worst job in Korea. Mailed in stool samples. Yuck.

My Lil’ Cthulhu

In my Kindergarten part-time classes, I got to do construction paper art. I love doing construction paper art. I made the entire cast of Homestar Runner for one of my previous school’s walls. Today, I had  to make something with two different classes.

The students had never done anything with construction paper before. First we went through the different colors of paper, then we talked about scissor safety. The students told me what they were planning on making, then tried to cut out something vaguely in that shape.

In my first class the students were at a lost for what to do. I made an elaborate fish with a multicolored rainbow tail. One boy made a snowman, the other a bird. A girl also made a fish like mine, except she made fins that poked out in the third dimension. Awesome.

I had a break to think about what I wanted to make with the older students. I decided to make My Lil’ Cthuhlu as a fun, but not scary, monster. The students in the second class of girls liked to make things for a princess, so they were making crowns they could wear. I set about making my monster, and they would cut out gems and measure their heads. There weren’t enough scissors, so we had to share. It was a lot of fun, and I’m really happy with the results, but truth be told it could have been more complete if there was a little more time. I put it up on the wall and snapped a picture to share it with the Internet.

Coming home to eat lunch, I ran into the teacher that will eventually replace me in the mornings. He saw the picture I took on my camera, and he loved it. He said he’d keep it up in class as long as he could! Yes!

The students said it was a funny, cute monster, and that they liked it. My friend, who plays D&D with me, was enthusiastic and supportive of My Lil’ Cthulhu. The Korean teaching staff liked my earlier fish a lot more than my madness inducing monster.

At least I made it friendly and cute. The last thing I wanted was an illithid in my class. Now that would be terrifying.

There was a tech support guy running around the school today. He was doing something with wiring and the computers. We weren’t told what he was up to, but there were two plastic and metal plates mounted to the sides of the secretary’s desk near the hallway to half of the classrooms of the school. It looked like two defibrillator paddles hooked up to a compuer on the side of the desk.I asked the director what the heck was going on with all of this.

It turned out the panels were sensors set to look for some sort of identification cards the students will wear starting this week. The students will keep these cards in their bags, and when they walk into school, or leave school, they will have to pass by these scanners to “log in” or “log out”. Imagine a checkout line in a grocery store.

The students coming in will rub their backpacks past this scanner and be counted present, then when the school lets out, the teachers will march them by the sensors and see them to the elevator. The computer will then record when they arrive and when they leave, which will then be uploaded to the Internet. Parents will then be able to track their children movement into the school, and when they leave. The computer will automatically send the parents an SMS message upon arrival and departure.

I guess this is eventually going to replace the attendance roll call we do by hand. If it works practically, which I’ll give a 20% chance of ever occurring. Students that lose their ID card, have no bag, come excessively early, or get incorrectly scanned will plague this system. I also don’t know how they know who is arriving, and who is leaving. If it requires someone to switch between the two settings, it’s worse than the system we have now, because there are tons of students running around at break, and no teachers know what all students are doing at all times of the day.

Paranoid parents already have GPS phones that can check the location of their children. They can call their children too. Students as young as seven carry expensive phones for this reason. This is just one more way to keep track of kids. I find it a bit excessive myself.

I originally started this blog, way back in 2001, as a way to keep in touch with friends and family when I moved to Korea. There was this fear lurking in the back of my brain that when I left the United States I was about to fall off the side of the Earth, and no one was going to know what I was doing, what I liked, or how to contact me. Things have now gone in the complete opposite direction, and I’ve added a Twitter badge on the side of the page to let people know what I am doing at any moment I have some spare time in front of the computer. That’s irony.

I read this extremely interesting article about “ambient awareness“. The basic idea is that while one tweet or another might not be very much, but taken in aggregate over the course of days, weeks, or months, and you’ll build up a weak bond with a person that would have otherwise been nonexistent. That weak casual bond, as if you had known what someone was up to, as if you were watching them in the peripheral vision at a party.

I think I developed this fear of disconnection back in elementary school. Back then, I lived in rural Ohio, cut off from suburbia. At the time, I thought it was a bit of a curse. All the people at school would go home, visit their friends house down the street, and play together. If I went down the street I was likely going to get run over by a semi-truck. My only neighbors were corn and watermelons. When I would return to school after summer vacation, all those friendships people had advanced through the days they spent together, while I was sitting outside their bubble trapped by fields of corn in boredom.

It’s no wonder I was someone that go interested in computers, and the Internet, right away to make friends and keep up with people I knew. I would chat on my parents computer with it’s 2400 baud modem just to meet new people. When I had to go to college, I made lots of great friends, but returning home during summer meant being basically cut off again.

If going back home in the United States means I was cut off from my friends, just imagine what it was like when I decided to move to South Korea, across the planet. I started the blog to keep in touch with my friends and family. It is also a therapeutic way for me to get out my stress about living here. Now it’s grown into something else, a sort of professional diary where I archive my teaching thoughts, place where I talk about my hobbies, and a personal window into my vacations and travels.

Still, it’s all about that connection I’m trying to maintain across great distances. Hell, my friends who read my site took a week of their time to visit me and tour Korea. In my mind, it’s proof that all that effort, those thousands of hours spent blogging, have paid off.

Twitter is an even more hyper-version of a blog. It’s faster. It’s more personal. I might tweet a thought between classes, or (If Twitter ever gets a Korean SMS number) explain something anywhere I go. I’m interested in it as an experiment in connectivity. It’s a shame that none of my friends in the States, or Korea, really use it. I’m currently following some fellow Korean bloggers, some Internet celebrities, and whatnot, but I’m the early adopter when it comes to these things in my circle.

Anyway, what are you doing?

I was walking home on a busy street in a nice area of town that has a lot of academies and other businesses. I was walking on the sidewalk near a busy street, and was headed towards a subway stop two blocks away. I was listening to my mp3 player, as always, and minding my own business. All of a sudden, a car pulled over a few meters in front of me, a man dressed in business slacks, business shirt, and a tie gets out of the driver’s side of the car. I wasn’t really paying that much attention, as people park illegally all the time.

As I was walking by, the man jumped into my field of view and said to me, “EX-cuse me, do you have some time?”

I looked at him like I had been slapped by a fish. “Huh? Uh…no…I’m going home…now….” I spoke in a declarative, yet slightly confused tone. I mean, he was the guy clearly making time for me by illegal parking and cutting me off on the sidewalk to meet me. I was worried by his bizarre behavior. I didn’t know if he was going to interview me for a job, ask for an autograph, or ask me to hop into his car for sex. I must have said it forcefully enough that he didn’t feel the need to follow up, as he left me alone.

I thought, “What a weirdo. Jumping out of a car to talk to me? A complete stranger? What the hell? Who would do that? He must be really desperate to talk to a foreigner about something. That makes me feel oddly important.” When I finally got to the subway, I was laughing about it.

But when I explained what had happened to my wife, I thought, “What a weirdo. Jumping out of a car to talk to me? A complete stranger? What the hell? Who would do that?” and was genuinely creeped out by that sort of attention. I can usually deal with this sort of stuff, but for whatever reason it sort of set off my spider-sense that something was going on that I didn’t know about.

Anyway, for any Korean readers, swerving, illegal parking, then trying to strike up a conversation= TRYING WAY TOO HARD.

My “socially promoted” student has been bumped up to keep up with his peers. He’s completely oblivious to most forms of logic and coherent thought. For example, today, without irony, when one of his classmates spoke Korean, he shouted, “Hangul mal! HANGUL MAL! (KOREAN! KOREAN!)” to tattle. I just looked at him like he was from another planet.

Him: “Teacher! HE say~HANGUL MAL!!:

Me: “So did you!”

Him: “NO I didn’t! WHEN?” (Also in Korean)

Me: (FACEPALM)

This is typically how conversations with this student goes. You just grab your head and try to shake out the stupid.

The student the socially promoted boy tried to get in trouble has been his rival for the past few weeks. It turns out that the socially promoted boy was in the bathroom, and the rival boy walked into the stall on accident and saw him exposed. The rival had embarrassed the socially promoted boy by saying, “Oh, so you ARE a boy, and all this time I was wrong. How was I supposed to know this was the bathroom you used?”

OH SNAP!

I didn’t know of this rivalry until today when the rival student raised his hand to go to the bathroom. The socially promoted boy evidently saw this as his chance at revenge. I granted the boy permission and the socially promoted boy asked, in Korean, “Big one, or little one?” as his rival was heading towards the door.

The rival was looking aghast, as he didn’t really feel the need to tell the entire class what he was planning to do in the bathroom. Coming to his rescue, I said, “What, do you want to see what he’s going to do? If you do, you can go with him and watch.”

Everyone laughed, and the rival boy left to go to the bathroom alone.

The socially promoted boy tried again when he returned and tried ribbing him again in Korean. “That was a long time in the bathroom? Wow, did you get thirsty and drink some of that bathroom water?”

Harsh.

In Korean, I replied by asking the returning student, “Hey, did you take a picture of your trip to the bathroom? He wants to see if it was big or small. He really wants to see a picture. I think he missed you.”

Score another one for me. The aggressor boy backed down after being laughed at again, and the class got back to business. I’m usually not this mean to students, but this whole class is filled with students that snipe at each other constantly, and the mean streak is can infect you.

Unfortunately for my afternoon classes full of elementary school students, I’ve got a temporary kindergarten class filled with genius students. These children are seven years old and read at an American 2nd grade level. That is three to four years older than NATIVE SPEAKERS their age. They’ve been studying English intensely for two or three years. That’s pretty impressive considering when students in third or fourth grade elementary school students couldn’t read and understand some of the books these kindergarten students could read.

We were having a discussion about good and bad insects. The students refuse to let me speak Korean in front of them, but they need to know which insects we were talking about. We had gone through all the examples in the book, and were trying to expand their vocabulary. I was trying to explain “termite” to the students. I told them it was a little white ant that likes to eat wood. The word in Korean translated literally means (흰개미, huin-kae-me) “white ant”, and it was a hint. They didn’t understand me, but wanted me to continue explaining what a termite is in English.

This is the difference between a good English student and one of my poorer students in my afternoon classes. Students that say, “Well, keep explaining about it in English using words I know and I’ll understand what it means without needed the Korean word” do well. Students that instantly say, “KOREAN TALKING SAY!” will languish and be an annoyance in class until they try harder and think.

The kindergarten students eventually relented on their “ABSOLUTELY NO KOREAN” policy. They said I was allowed to speak Korean SOMETIMES, like on a break, or when they didn’t know a word but really needed to finish their work, but only then in extreme cases, and no more than three Korean words a day, if I absoultely HAD to. I don’t want to break their strict rule of immersion in English anything, but once I told them the Korean word, they instantly knew what I was talking about. I did watch my tongue and didn’t get warned about speaking any Korean hints the rest of the day.

On completion of their exercises, I got to review their work. The absolute best answer I have ever read about insects came from a seven year old little girl. We were talking about why insects are good. She wrote on her own in her notebook, “Insects are good because they are fun to step on.”

That’s fantastic. Students in middle school classes don’t show that kind of wit and humor often.