::A Geek in Korea::

I stumbled upon Idiocracy through a link to Youtube on Fark. I don’t even read Fark anymore, but for some reason the line was titled was “Wonder why Fox dumped Mike Judge’s “Idiocracy?” This clip will probably clear that up (not safe for work language)“

 This was the video I watched. I was interested in the movie after the clip so I went to find out more about it. Turns out, it’s a Mike Judge (Office Space!) movie that received little to no promotion, wasn’t screened in more than a handful of theaters, and was pushed out to DVD.

Wow, if they such low expectations from a movie, it must have been a total bomb, right? Think again. Now that I’ve seen the film, I’m surprised this is so under the radar. Just like Office Space, a quotable cult classic, this movie has a lot of great humor. I want to get the word out about this undiscovered black comedy.

The premise is this: In the future, idiots out breed intelligent people, and over the course of 500 years the IQ of America plummets. The world is in crisis due to overwhelming stupidity. A few people, put into a state of suspended animation and later forgotten about awaken to find themselves the smartest people on Earth. They try to fix their situation while living in a comedic moron-filled dystopia.

The movie has a lot of hilarious quotes that would have made it a hit on campus or between friends. It’s also got a lot of anti-corporate jabs that probably got it in trouble with it’s distributors, prompting it’s quiet release. It’s a satire in low brow form that gets it’s point across. I also like it’s jab at advertising and politics too. It’s a crime this movie isn’t more popular.

The saddest thing about this movie was this described what it was like for me to be in high school in any “general” level class. I think I connected to the protagonist after he had an argument shot down for how he talked or the words he used being “to big”. This sort of  behavior irritated the hell out of me in High School. Ironically, one of the biggest sources of annoyance was “Beavis and Butt-head“, also created by Mike Judge.

I’ve got a class full of smart boys and girls that sometimes give me a few problems. There are a few students in the class that love to give me some backtalk and complain about homework from time to time.

Around two weeks ago, I had assigned something the loudest of the students told me was, “Too hard.” This would be a fair criticism if everything else in class wasn’t “too something” all the time. The student in question always looks for an excuse to complain, and I was getting pretty sick of his attitude. He said, “I hate doing homework, so I’m not going to do this because it’s hard and I don’t want to.”

I remember the conversation in particular because I wrote in my notes for a class, “Student was sarcastic and rude about homework.” I also took him out of class and had him talk to the head Korean teacher. That was my last time thinking about it.

The mother of the student in question came in today. I guess parents are getting calls from the Korean teachers, and this was the week where this particular class got a call. The woman came to the school with her children to defend him. She went to complain to the director and head teacher that whatever I was accusing the student of saying was untrue.

Yeah, I’m going to make something up about a student…why? I was in the office when the head teacher came in and explained the situation to me. This woman was furious I accused her son of being lazy and sarcastic in class. The other foreigner in the office just chuckled and basically seconded my assessment of the student.

I went out to make copies and this woman was outside talking to the director. She gave me this hurtful, wounded, “You’re the one, aren’t you! Why would you do this?!” look. It’s funny, because she was being very over dramatic about this. She actually was as dramatic as the boy could be when complaining about homework at times. Makes sense I guess.

The head teacher called in the student to ask him if he remembered the event. I told him he had said, “I don’t want to do it. I hate this.”

The boy claimed to have only complained about the difficulty of the work. He denied saying that he had used the word, “hate” at all. The head teacher went to work on him. She said that when she was talking to his mother, there had been even less wrongdoing on the boys part. It seems the boy has several versions of what happened, depending on how much sympathy he thinks he could get.

The head teacher told the student, “I told your mother the version that your teacher told me what happened. Go tell her the same thing so she believes us. I don’t like being called a liar.”

Yikes. I’m glad I wasn’t around for that. However, I’ve very glad that even with parents wanting to tear my eyes out, my coworkers have my back and believe me over students. Too bad we don’t have the recording to prove who was right.

Later, while I was looking for some classroom material, I found a list of “100 words every High School Students should know“. I’m only confident in my knowledge of 66% of the words, but I could probably pass a multiple choice test if I had to guess. How well would you do? Since I’m going to use this as teaching material, I’ll have to look up some words for class.

*(I hate studying. I’m not going to do it. Look at these words. They are too hard.)

It’s been a fairly annoyance free week in Ubuntu Edgy Eft. Since I didn’t have much else to do, I decided to check out some games I’ve enjoyed in the past. I’ve been trying, off and on for quite some time now, to find a rogue-like game that suits me. I don’t like Nethack, and can’t bear something having an excessive number of elves and Tolkien. While I like IVAN I haven’t given it a try in Linux. Besides, that thing has actual *graphics*. Pssh, graphical roguelikes? Might as well play Diablo.

Along the way bouncing from one version of Ubuntu to another , I’ve discovered “Lindsey’s Dungeon Crawl“. This is a full on ASCII rogue like. Characters are all represented by It’s got the standard “delve into the underworld, get the Orb of Zot from some baddie, the return to the surface” style plot (AKA: none, the way I like it.)

What originally got me started playing this game was the fact that I could watch it being played at crawl.akrasiac.org without installing anything. In theory I could learn how to play and get better at it. I’m aware that watching people play this game makes me the King Geek of the Internet. You want to talk about geeky? Watching Starcraft on television regularly is pretty bad. Watching ASCII based RPG games via telnet consoles? There is no meter as to judge how geeky that is. It’s seriously that far off the charts.

To play the game, all you need to do is pick a race, pick a profession,the go hack up some monsters. If you are as bad as I am, you’ll die often and restart. Simple, short, and quick to get (re)started. Print off a list of keyboard commands and get started.

I knew I was in for some problems when even hardcore players of the genre call this game “difficult”. Here is how hard this game is: At the moment, my highest scoring character is someone that ran out of the first level of the dungeon, quiting the game by returning to the surface without the Orb of Zot. Basically, my BEST character committed suicide on the first level rather than being inevitably slain by monsters. I’m so bad at this game, a character committing suicide by running away to quit the game is valued at four times the progress I’ve made so far in reaching my goal. That’s a tough game.

I’ve never been any good at any game in this entire genre. I play too recklessly because I’ve never gotten far enough to care about one of the characters survival. I also don’t know how to play well enough to get far in the game. Once I got over the controls, I didn’t have any difficulty playing the game, other than being absolutely terrible.

Games aside, I’m still using Linux as my day to day OS of choice. I haven’t booted into Windows in a week. My parents are set to call me over Skype, so I’ll need to eventually fire Windows back up so we can video chat. Also, Windows recognizes my microphone, unlike Linux. I’ve consumed all the media on my portable D2, so I’ll need to boot back into Windows to encode more videos.

I tried out Avidemux which looks like it should be able to do the video encoding I need, but there are too many options and settings I need to figure out. Any Cowon D2 owners want to help me out? I’ve got videos resized to 320×240 but that’s about it. When I load them up on the D2 they just skip or lock up the machine. What should the container files be? The codecs to use while transcoding? Anything?

I had some guests over today. One of the people in question had a severe dog phobia, to the point where a small dog like Yoshi could make her cry and go hysterical. I’ll never understand this behavior. I put Yoshi out on the apartment veranda. He hadn’t had his walk during the day, so he was a little excitable.

The other non panic prone guest was on the couch while I was helping calm the person down at the dinner table, offering something to drink. The person on the couch looked at me uncomfortably and said, “Your dog…is eating his own poo on the veranda now.”

No sooner had I got out to prevent this, than I had a knock at the door. The dry cleaner delivery, the reason we were waiting at the house had arrived. I had to quickly run to the bathroom, take off the plastic gloves, and answer the door, pay the guy, hang up the clothes, and run back to finish up cleaning the mess from the dog. It was rather frantic, and my guests were taken for a surprise.

After all that cleaning and running around, it’s kind of hard to pick up a conversation about how having a dog is great. Right now as I type it’s a rough sell for me, as my dog has gas from his little “meal” earlier, and he’s stinking up the entire room the computer and his cage share.

There is a bit of a scandal brewing. Seems this music video has been [tag]banned[/tag] from Korean television after blatantly ripping off Final Fantasy: Advent Children. It’s shot for shot identical, which is pretty impressive since the original was done in CGI, but extremely shady and intellectually dishonest. This is beyond “imitation”. This is straight [tag]theft[/tag], and it’s barely worth emulating from the start. At least they ripped off the best part of the otherwise unwatchable film.

I don’t care about [tag]Final Fantasy: Advent Children[/tag] or anything involving the “Final Fantasy 7″ cast of characters. I find the whole series fairly over rated and 1o years past cool. The game was fairly groundbreaking for it’s time, but people need to move on.

I also don’t voluntarily listen to [tag]K-pop[/tag] all that often either. It still surprises me when Korean artists blatantly rip off people and expect to get away with it simply because in the past Korean music had less international exposure. With the Internet breaking down borders, it simply doesn’t work that way anymore.

Today, if things were right with the world,would have been Arbor Day in Korea. I say “would have been” because two years ago the South Korean government wiped it’s holiday status as a concession to businesses for officially moving to a five day work week. While it’s still technically celebrated, it’s not celebrated in the “close the banks and schools” manner that gives me a day off work. It’s more of a “Groundhog Day” sort of holiday now.This was my “issue” of the day. I managed to bring it up in each class no matter the age or relevancy. Any time a student was late, I’d ask them nonsensical questions relating to the holiday. I did my best pundit spin on the issue to try to stir up controversy.

“Did you just get back from planting a tree, is that why you were late?”

“Uh, no teacher. That’s not why we…”

“Oh, you were you to busy stepping on flowers and burning down forests to come to class on time? Is that it?

“Why do you hate trees so much!? Knock it off! Be quiet! Stop crying! Where’s your homework?”

I’d have cut their microphones too, but they don’t wear any. They call me a bully, but I think I got my point across in a condescending and intimidating manner that made it very clear everyone should agree with me or face intensive punishment and lots of homework.

The entire day I was asking students if they were aware of the whole “missing holiday” issue. Most of them had a “It sucks, but what are we going to do about it?” attitude. Typical “surrender all your holidays to people that hate your free time,” behavior.

One student jokingly told me that there were actually so many cases of accidental forest fires caused by people smoking in parks and on previous Arbor Days that there might have been a net loss of trees. He said it might be a good idea to keep people at work if we wanted to save trees on Arbor Day.

Forest fires be damned, I plan to launch an extensive smear campaign against him and his kind that spread lies about the nature of Arbor Day. The War on Arbor Day must end!

I heard he likes to eat dogs, but that’s not a rumor I can confirm at this time. It’s just a preliminary report that I’m sure we’ll hear about later. People that hate holidays like to eat adorable puppies while burning trees in National Parks.

This sort of puppy kicking defeatist attitude leads to the loss of holidays. What’s next? No more Children’s Day because children don’t get all the gifts they want from their parents? There is no time to talk about how many trees we’ve lost to accidental forest fires when we’ve got my afternoon to save.

Just so you know, I’m the guy that complains about Day Light Savings making me wake up an hour earlier. I’ve been on the front lines of this sort of confrontation before. If the farmers want to get more done, let them adjusts their alarm clocks, or failing that, train their roosters to wake them up earlier. I shouldn’t have to change my habit of sleeping in for someone else. I’ll fight to the death for my right to sleep in, and anyone that doesn’t agree with that doesn’t deserve a clock to change!

Of course, they don’t have Day Light Savings in Korea, so I can’t make a big deal out how “time hugging farmers” are ruining people’s lives. This lack of Arbor Day might only be a single day on the calendar, but the principal must be defended! There is a war against public holidays in the country and someone has to take a stand for everyone that loves freedom (from school)!

Younger students think the strangest things about their teachers. Very often the best thing to do is simply play along and let them figure things out for themselves.

At work, the schedules of the different part time teachers are staggered. On some days all the teachers start at the same time, while on other days people start at different hours and go home early. The other full time teachers sometimes have been around for hours when I go to work. There is an agreement that they must arrive at the same time out of “fairness and respect for their coworkers”. I’m happy I can go to work 30 minutes before my classes instead of arriving at the same time every day regardless of when my classes start.

When I come into work on my own while previous classes are still in session, I often run into students in the hallways. They might be waiting for class to start the next hour, going to the bathroom, or simply being a little tardy getting to class. Almost all of them get a surprised look on their face when they see me arriving in a coat and getting settled into my desk.

“Where did you go?” they’ll ask suspiciously. This used to really bother me when I first started teaching. I thought they were trying to be nosey, but now I realize that most young students think I live “in America” and fly to work each day. Either that, or that I live in one of the school classrooms they aren’t allowed to enter.

“I didn’t go anywhere! I’m starting work soon. I just got here.” I’ll answer.

“Oh, why didn’t you teach the other classes?” Some students think that my schedule is the same as every other teacher. This is a very reasonable assumption, since they don’t know about how the schedule works. What’s strange is that if I’m not in class, they assume there are some bored students sitting in a classroom without a teacher, waiting for me to arrive. I guess I’d wonder why I’d was sitting around too if I thought about things this way.

“There aren’t any classes right now for me. My class starts next hour. See you then!”

Then they usually say, “Ohhhh,” and walk off confused.  They’ve perfected the whole, “pretend to understand the strange man without angering him too much” thing.

It takes a long time for simple facts to settle in about my life outside the school. I’ve been teaching students for close to six months that still can’t remember that I’m married. Even after they’ve seen us together outside the school. I don’t bring it up anyway. More of my students remember that I have a cute puppy than a wife. This is why on the first day of new classes I always show a picture of my dog to new students. It’s something they always remember about me, even if they think I live under the desk.

Now that I have regular science classes I have to teach, I’m back to teaching about planets once again. Except in higher levels, most of my students didn’t have electronic dictionaries in class. Now due to the heavy “translate the vocabulary” style requirements of learning a science in a foreign language, a good number of students are able to look up new words quickly when they need extra help. Students can use their phones, or stand alone electronic dictionaries to look up anything I might say in class.

I was helping student say the word “Uranus” once again without having them pronounce it as “Your anus” in English. Of course, not of my students knew what an “anus” was. I told them to look it up, which lead to the entire class bursting out in tears of laughter. The Korean word is “Hang-mun” (항문) (Hanja: 肛門).

One of the cool things about Korean dictionaries is that if a word has a Chinese root (70%+ do), then they print the Chinese characters next to the words in the dictionary. This is needed because there are so many homonyms in Korean. It just so happens that I knew the Hanja (Chinese character) of one of the syllables of the word. The “mun” (문) of “Hang-mun” is the character for the word “door” (門) (It’s a pictogram.)

So, what did that other Chinese character mean? Since middle school students study Chinese characters intensely, I sought one out. First, I showed them the character for “door”. “I know what this means.” I told them.

Then I showed them the first set of Chinese characters,”肛”, and told them “This is pronounced ‘Hang‘. What does it mean?” The students didn’t understand until I showed them the the Korean word that comes from the Chinese characters,(항문) “Hang-mun“. What would you do if your foreign teacher demanded a serious answer about a word that immature? Then they simply laughed like the elementary school children and asked why I needed to know what the word meant. Since I didn’t have a good reason, I just told them how it happened to be a topic in class and I wanted to figure it out for myself instead.

Today I solved the answer to my satisfaction. One student brought a brand new electronic dictionary to class. He was telling me it could do English, Korean, Japanese, and Chinese, and it had handwriting recognition too. He was showing me all the really cool features, so I looked up the word again, then selected the Chinese characters and looked THOSE up in the Chinese to Korean dictionary.

The word ended up meaning, according to his dictionary, “The door of the ass”, which is way, way funny. Now I can laugh in three languages about that word.

I have a class of annoying elementary school children I don’t look forward to teaching. I teach them for an hour, then my director. Today, none of the students in the class did their homework. Most of them were extremely sarcastic, and did many other things to get on my nerves.

Usually this is no big deal, because the next teacher in class, my director, is as hard nosed as they come. I simply pass on any information about their behavior and they are corrected. Today they were exceptionally bad, so I was looking to put a hurt on them and keep them from having break until all of my homework was completed.

My director was being kept busy by a mother that had just enrolled her son at our school. She was assuring them about the content of the English books, the manner of the science program, and all sorts of other issues. I didn’t dare go up to her while she was trying to impress a parent by saying, “Hey, your next class is full of brats that don’t do homework.”

The woman simply wouldn’t leave, so by the time the next class started, the bad students had no teacher and were roaming the halls with impunity. They ended up disrupting my next class by peeking out of their classroom and running down the hall to watch what my director was doing.

They thought they were being clever.They were wearing masks for yellow dust, but they had put them on in the classroom. Even if we weren’t smart enough to figure out who was missing in a class of 8 students or by simply looking at what they were wearing, they put on the masks in the classroom that has closed circuit television sets that record everything the do. Idiots.

Since I had not one, but two classes ruined by them, I tracked down my director as soon as she finished talking to the woman under the guise of printing some papers. I asked if she had a hard time getting away from that woman, since she was supposed to be teaching class at that moment. She gave me a surprised look. “I thought it was your hour to teach those kids! I didn’t go to class because I thought you were teaching them!”

Since when do I let my children run around the school and bother other classes? She apologized to me for forgetting to teach and letting them bother my other class.  I’d like it if she could contain their little [tag]mischief[/tag] to one class from now on. The last thing I need is a school full of children like them.

Today was going to be a trip to the countryside for my wife and I. We wanted to go to the nearest mountain to check out the newly sprouting spring cherry blossoms. While cherry blossoms are a wonderful thing that ushers in spring each year, there is also something that mark’s it’s arrival. It’s the phenomenon of Hwangsa (황사), or Yellow Dust.

I’ve written about this issue before. We were woken by a safety text message that stated “The yellow dust will be very bad today. Be careful outside.” When I went to check the window, the sky was a nasty yellow gray color. It was 20-30 times worse than normal today. Yellow skies are entirely the wrong color, so I decided to spend a lazy day inside. Since it was Sunday, that wasn’t a very big deal. Napping. Gaming. Not grading the papers I need to do for work tomorrow. The usual.

Eventually I had to go out. Yoshi needs his walk, and I needed to return a DVD rental to the local corner store. We used to own respiratory masks for traveling outside during the yellow dust storms to prevent that burning “Did someone spray something toxic out here?” feeling at the back of your throat.

We only wear dust masks in spring, but our old masks got misplaced. The pharmacy at the local corner store only sells smaller mask styles, and my wife wants to purchase larger ones for this storm season. Thus I had to walk the dog outside without a mask until we go to the store (after this post) and buy new masks.

I was outside for about twenty minutes, “breathing as little as possible” through my mouth and by the time I got inside my throat was raspy as if I had been yelling at students for hours. Nasty.

I’ll pass on a rumor I’ve recently heard: Koreans love sharing the health benefits of traditional Korean food. Food as medicine is a very popular idea. It seems that “Miyuk-guk” (미역국), or Seaweed soup, is supposed to help clear out the heavy toxic metals from your body that you get from breathing in the yellow dust. I’m not sure where this meme is coming from, but my wife is repeating it often enough. I don’t eat much miyuk-guk, health benefits or not.  I’ll probably get Snope’d again on this.