::A Geek in Korea::

Toribash is a weird game. It’s free, available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. It’s a fighting game, but not like anything you’ve probably seen before. I heard about this game months ago, but at the time I’m not sure if there was a Linux release. When I finally heard I’d have a chance to play it, I downloaded it to see if the rumors about wanton violence and weird gameplay was true. It delivered on both counts.
The game is played in turns where the time in the fight is “Stopped” and each player plots their moves. Each player is represented by a blocky figure with joints and muscle groups that can be extended, contracted, relaxed, etc. The process of punching or kicking requires you to manipulate the muscle groups involved in making this action occur in your own body. For example, if you want to grab the opponents head, you have to move three or four different muscles to lift the shoulders, reach with the arm, grab with the hands, etc.

After you select a muscle to move, their is a “shadow” showing how your body will react when you start animating. If this isn’t what you intended, you can change around how you want to move. Then, when you want to end your turn, you press a button and several frames of animation will take place.

You then repeat the process of positioning your body, trying to grab the opponent and hurt them more than they hurt you. I haven’t decapitated anyone yet, but I have hurt someone’s arm. Right now, the most carnage I’ve seen was when I managed to make my own leg fall of when trying to attack someone STANDING STILL AND NOT FIGHTING BACK. How do you even DO that?

Toribash is a turn based, three dimensional, movement oriented fighting game with brutal deaths. It’s totally awesome. They’ve modeled real matial arts moves in the game. For example, you can even do Traditional Korean Taek Kyon.

That’s AWESOME.

They include lots of replays to let you see how people much better at the game fight. It’s a unique with a thriving community. It’s worth checking out, even just to play with the rag doll physics. I’ve got a few days to practice since Brawl isn’t here, but it’s very complicated. A solid hit so I could replay it would be fantastic.

In my lowest level class of “just barely qualify as readers”, we are reading a storybook once a week. This is a time for intensive review, pronunciation improvement, and basic handwriting. The students have tapes, storybooks, and workbooks, and their general task is to drill, drill, drill until the story is burned into their brains. I must facilitate this by making the material as interesting as possible despite the fact that they’ve seen and read it 50 or more times already.  This isn’t very easy to do.

My method of presenting familiar material in a different and engaging manner today involved a white board and several different colored markers. I wrote a sentence on the board randomly in each of the three different colors. The students had to recreate the sentences in their notebooks correctly.

I started with one sentence, then when most of the students had figured out what I had written, I added the second sentence in a second color. This way the slow students could keep working, and the faster students could get a second challenge. I saved the third sentence, the most difficult, for anyone that finished the second challenge.

At the end of the time, everyone had the second challenge finished, and the third challenge was being decoded as the bell rang. Had I gotten the students through the third sentence, I had a slew of words written on the board, ripe for a reading exercise as I erased them one by one.

The students had a lot of fun with this exercise. The divide between students that had studied to the point of memorization and those that only did minimal work was stark. I think I’ll do this once a storybook from now on.

I was listening to a Jordan Jesse Go! episode where Jordan Morris was talking about what he did on a typical day after work. He talked about watching Mystery Science Theater 3000 on Google Video, playing his advanced copy of Super Smash Brothers (I’m waiting for mine to be delivered!) and watching Futurama.

This is basically what I do to spend my free time too. It’s UNCANNY and a little unnerving to think someone spends their time the exact same way I do most days. The one thing he mentioned he’s made and effort to check out when he has the chance is The Venture Brothers. I had never seen the show before, but on the strength of his recommendation, I decided to check it out.

I’ve only watched a few episodes of The Venture Brothers so far, but I know I’ll be watching it from start to finish already. It’s great. It’s funny and it has a great sense of humor about itself. It could be that I’ve seen a lot of Johnny Quest, so I appreciate what they are doing with the show. There are a lot of jokes I’m catching up on that I’ve seen on the Internet that must have originated on this show.

I’ve been watching two episodes a day now, and I’ve enjoyed them all. I’d recommend it to anyone looking for an adult, funny, but not serious sort of show. It’s very “Adult Swim”. It’s violent without being too graphic, comically sexual, and very funny. The animation looks great too! I was skeptical going in that it wouldn’t be my style, but Jordan has good taste.

Thanks JJ go!

I was finished with my lesson with my upper level class, and I wanted to see if they’d enjoy a riddle. Here is the riddle I gave them.

“A man lives in a tall building. Every day he rides the elevator down to the bottom floor to go to work. When it’s a sunny day, he returns, takes the elevator half way up the apartment building, and walks the rest of the way up on the stairs. On rainy days, he takes the elevator all the way up. Why?”

Believe it or not, one of my students solved this riddle before I had finished explaining it to the rest of the class. He said he had heard a variant of it and knew how to solve it immediately. Seeing as I wanted this riddle to last at least five minutes, I was shocked he got this material right away.

I needed to give the class another riddle and hope he hadn’t seen it before. Here is my second riddle.

“A woman was in a room. The radio in the room went off. The woman died. Why?”

This one was much tougher. I wrote the sentences down, and let them try to make grammatically correct statements to solve the riddle, but it wasn’t till I gave them a few hints that someone guessed to correct answer. The students thought the answer to the question was amusing, but “dark.” Whatever. It ate up a few minutes of time. I should squirrel away a few more riddles in case I need to do this again in a class.

My wife went to an interview today for a job at a local elementary school. She wants to be hired as an English teacher. She and I used to work together at our school, and she’s been working at different schools around the city. The headhunter agency got her an interview where she would be the solo applicant. She put down all her relative experience and information, and was prepared for an interview about substantive topics. Instead she came back home to talk about how weird the interview was.

The principals and head teachers were involved in the interview process. They asked amazingly inane questions such as:

“When students travel to other countries, they frequently can’t understand what people are saying. Why is that?”

Yeah, no kidding. People probably speak faster, use harder vocabulary, and don’t greet everyone by saying “Hello, how are you?” every single time. You also can’t ask them to repeat the CD and listen 20 times to memorize the response. Do you really think the joke programs most elementary schools have prepare anyone for life outside a kindergarten class?

“What accents can you speak in?”

This threw her for a loop. Was he seriously asking about regional dialects? The principal wanted her to do voices? What was he even asking? The follow up question was even more bizarre:

“What is the “original” pronunciation people should sound like? Which is the correct way to pronounce English?”

In Korean, the accent most people hear is somewhat standardized around the Kyeonggi region because that’s what on television most often. There are regional dialects like any other language. This guy wanted to know which one was “correct.” Somewhat exasperated by the question, she explained how each country talked differently, and of course they all thought they were “correct” in their own way or another. She said she was comfortable listening to an American accent because she lived with me, but that she also learned “British” English studying in Australia.

She didn’t ask if the principal would go to another region in Korea and tell the people their way of speaking was “incorrect” and “not original”. It’s best not to make waves when you are being interviewed by a clueless middle aged Korean man in a high ranking position. They’ll disqualify you for showing them up.

One of the other people sitting in on the meeting asked:

“Which is better for learning English? Studying at school, or studying at an academy?”

My wife, having taught at both, gave her opinion thusly: If you want intensive learning in English, once or twice a week isn’t going to be enough. If students see things more often, it can help their memory. It depends on the program and their systems. Academies are more intensive and give more in depth information. They also have a foreigner to talk to and learn from. This helps people practice their pronunciation and getting over shyness when speaking.

“Have you worked with, or know any foreigners?”

Hello? She said she was MARRIED to one on the resume ? (Yeah, Korean resumes have stuff like that on them. Weird right?)

“Have you traveled outside of Korea?”

She listed an education certification from Australia, and she had to have mentioned that she had studied there for a year by this point in the interview. Also, she’s traveled to the United States, Europe, and parts of Asia with me.

Probably there is no room on her resume to list vacations, but why would this even matter? I’ve been to China, but I’m no more qualified to teach Chinese because of it. I guess certain people view travel as a qualification, and I know it’s made me a better teacher, but I’m not sure if that’s ever come up in an interview before.

I’m sure there were even more brain dead questions the interviewers had, but she didn’t tell me any of them. She was the only person applying for the job. The other applicant had been notified by phone that they didn’t meet the qualifications. Whatever they had done, they had looked at that person’s resume to decide they weren’t getting the job. This makes the questions they asked my wife more mysterious.

As a former college Subway employee, the current Pseudopod horror podcast entitled “It’s Easy to Make a Sandwich” had me chuckling in a far too disturbing way. This wasn’t straight horror, but more of a messed up nihilistic revenge fantasy.

The idea about the disconnect the hands sometimes make from the brain when working in low wage jobs is completely true. I could have made a sandwich in my sleep after a few months at that job. The lifers, the daydreams, the contemplations of the different customers, the tuna stink…all of it seemed way too close to home.

The only poisoning we ever did was unwittingly selling bad crab salad a few times. Honest.

Today, in regular Sunday fashion had me playing video games again with some foreigners. This time, however, I was gaming with people on two different continents.

I got word that there would be another gaming challenge going down at the Xbox room. We didn’t expect a lot of people to show up, so I got word to set up a cooperative game of something. I had chosen Gears of War, to see what it was like, but when a third player showed up, we ended up playing Halo 3 campaign. Surprisingly, this is the first time I’ve ever played Halo for an extended period of time.

Gears of War was subtitled, but Halo 3 had full Korean menus and voice acting. This meant we had NO idea what the story was the entire time we were playing. If we were required to do something, we had to figure it out, usually by destroying things or pushing buttons. This lead to a lot of backtracking, guessing, and traveling to corners of the map “just to see” if this way where to go.

I’m not sure about the Halo 3 gameplay. It’s bright and colorful, and there is no blood, but there were a LOT of weapons that seemed mediocre and useless. There were would be some awesome weapons you would win off your enemies, but they lasted a few hits and you needed to scrounge something else up.

Occasionally there would be large battles that were really fun (TANKS! WARHOGS! WRAITHS! FIGHTING!) but the rest of the levels were normally “hit a button, now BACK TRACK!” The repetitive levels DID not help when you needed to find someplace new to visit. When we were in the open areas fighting HUGE things, it was a total blast.  I like Call of Duty 4 a lot more. Nothing in Halo 3 made me care when I died, but Call of Duty makes every death seem intense.

I had to leave the Halo game (my eyes were almost bleeding because of all the light bloom anyway) because I had made a promise to play Wesnoth via the Internet. I have a new webcam that works flawlessly in Linux. We set up a Skype video chat, then went at it. I won the first game handily, then got disconnected from the next two just when they were getting interesting.

This was a problem with previous versions of Wesnoth games I played on the Internet too. While the local player and hotseat stuff works perfectly, the disconnects didn’t get resolved when I rejoined the game online. I’m not sure what was causing the problems. I hope the next time we try this sort of game it’ll work better than this.

Next weekend we’ll play a few hours of Magic the Gathering. Hopefully, my copy of Brawl will arrive in the mail sometime this week. Then I’ll play through trying to unlock as many characters as I can, and then host a series of games with foreigners at my house.

We went to the Daejeon Citizens game today. They lost in spectacular fashion to the Jeju FC. At half time they handed out toilet paper for the fans to throw. This was to encourage the team, but it really was the best possible metaphor for their play. The best part of the game was a very enthusiastic fan in our row cheering for the game Dancing Homer style. He was really, REALLY into his cheerleading. SO much so, I recorded video on my camera. Enjoy.

A long time ago, after I started reading Boing Boing, I delved into Cory Doctorow’s personal website craphound to listen to a few podcasts. Actually, I treated his older material like audiobooks, as they were released before I ever knew about them, and I simply used a podcast aggregation too to organize and download all the material easily. That was one of the things that got me started listening to podcasts a few years ago.

Things were going well for a while, but then he started reading “The Hacker Crackdown“. While this is an important book for real life hackers and the culture of hacking, I quickly grew bored with this material. This I tolerated for a few weeks, until finally I gave up caring about the minutiae of the different cracking rings and the dated terminology. I went off to discover different podcasts, which is ultimately for the best.

Low and behold, 30 weeks later, Craphound.com is back in my podcasting queue once again as there is a new science fiction novella being read week by week. This story, True Names, is about Post-Singularity Entities fighting for all the available computational cycles left before the Entropic death of the universe. In other words, really interesting speculative science fiction just like I used to enjoy.

A lot of Cory Doctorow’s speculative short fiction is Post-Singularity, Cyberpunk sort of stuff. I can take my Science Fiction is a lot of different flavors, but this story still feels somewhat fresh for me. If you want most Post-Singular podcasts from the same author, try this, or this (with mechs!). As long as Cory Doctorow’s pumping out the Creative Commons stories, I’ll probably be around to listen to them.

In my incredibly large class of noisy students, a series of decrees from the director has brought most of the students behavior in line. Mostly. I’ve also been altering my classroom style to try to get the students more active in class, but little did I know that even greater participation sometimes has a downside when strange children are involved.

We were doing a dictation lesson with homophones that required the students to pick the correct word from context clues. “Please smell the beautiful: Flour / Flower. Circle one,” sort of thing. Since telling the student which answers isn’t going to work, I told the students that people that had the correct answer could come up and write the answer on the board for everyone else to see.

Several girls hands shot up, and the boy who vomits in his mouth about getting test questions wrong also volunteered. While I was confident that even Test Anxiety Boy could get all these questions correct 100%, I didn’t want to risk him being embarrassed by making a mistake and having a full stage, front of class mental breakdown. Who knows what would happen if everyone could see him get a question wrong. I chose the girls that volunteered, then told people that they would have a chance to participate at the board later in class.

This angers the little boy, as he wanted to show off in front of everyone. Test Anxiety Boy starts up on his “Freak out”© routine that is so familiar now that he owns several trademarks and copyrights regarding the exact nuance of it’s execution. There is the high pitched whine, followed by incomprehensible gibberish, then tears. This is followed by huffing, and in a new twist, doubling over and hiding his head under the desk. Little did I know that the doubling over was a reflexive means of protecting himself from the vomit he then preparing to spew.

The boy now vomits in class when he doesn’t get called on for things he wants to do. Lucky for me he only had a light lunch. He was escorted out of class by a far kinder student than I would have been if a boy had vomited in the seat in front of me in class. He grabbed some tissues while he was out of class and came back to clean up his mess while I did my best to prevent a riot. I do not get paid enough to handle sanitation of that sort, and if you’ve got a twitchy vomit reflex, cleaning up your own mess is something you need to accept and do without question.

Judging by their reactions, the rest of the class confused vomit with EBOLA virus (common mistake) and was almost clawing at the door to get out of the room, as if this boys neurosis was going to infect them all. I settled them down, and to my credit, finished the lecture while the boy handled the mess.

Other than the vomit, it was one of the better classes with them this month. (Shrug)