::A Geek in Korea::

In a thread somewhere I heard someone mention that listening to Radiolab is a good idea. I already subscribe to a Robert Krulwich podcast called Robert Krulwich on Science, which is an awesome, but infrequent podcast. Jad Abumrad was also an interesting person back on The Sound of Young America when interviewed by Jesse Thorn, who is part of Jordan, Jesse, Go! which is also one of my favorite podcasts. Anyway, this fusion of interests lead me to subscribe to the Radiolab podcast.

The first episode I managed to catch on the bus while returning home from work was mindblowingly awesome. It was piece recorded live in front of an audience about War of the Worlds, which happens to be one of those radio broadcasts I absolutely love.

I(f you have never heard War of the Worlds download and listen. It’s brilliant social engineering.)

Anyway, in this Radiolab episode about the War of the Worlds, they have managed to compile tons of facts about the original show, the inspiration, the imitators, and why these sorts of stories still affect people. People still want to believe, so they do, despite the story being so outlandish. It’s pretty incredible. Listening as they recreate the show, minute by minute, and explain how the different elements worked together to make an epic prank that fooled over a million people is really fascinating. Hearing about how this had been copied in Peru, and also done again thirty years later in America with a similar affect is really incredible. This sort of mass hysteria is very relevant now these days, both in Korea and the United States too.

While this is just a particular sweet spot of mine, where my love for War of the Worlds meets a well researched, very interesting podcast, there are four seasons of wonderful things that I can look forward to enjoying. Better yet, they are already posted on the Internet ready for me to download at my leisure. I’ve got hours upon hours of new, very good, very interesting podcasts to enjoy. This is a great find, and I’d highly recommend people to check out this series of shows. (RSS feed here.)

Get Your Cyborg Name

This is the greatest acronym ever.

Both my wife and I have downtime in the evening at the same time. I get back from classes later than she does, but her dramas are on television during the evening. This means that she uses the television most nights to watch her two television shows. This is the only television she watches. They are intolerably boring Korean dramas that I do not enjoy. One is a historical drama, while the other is a Korean family drama about people who eat, talk, and whine every episode.

I come back home from work and turn on the computer. This is because my “blog time” is an hour of time I dedicate to writing in the evening. My wife knows that I like to just write about my day, and gives me free reign to do this. Blogging in the evening lets me pound some keyboard and get my stress out so that I can unwind before I go to bed. It is also the time when my friends in the United States are occasionally online to chat with. She started watching television dramas around the same time I do my blog posting to keep out of my hair. She’s got something going on, and I’ve got something going on.

She can’t time compress her television viewing, but I can write as little or as much as I want. Very often, I’ll finish off my blog post in 30 minutes or less, and then have nothing of purpose to do on the computer. This would be when I would play Wii. However, since she’s using the television, I’m back to the computer to kill some time. She doesn’t bother me for blogging, and I don’t bother her during her Korean dramas. It’s a pact we’ve worked out over two years of marriage.

If this was the United States, I’d pick up a book and read for a bit, but since books are harder to come by, and I’m to lazy to do anything productive after work, I’m stuck. It’s not a huge deal to not have a second television. I’ve got other hobbies, and it reminds me I could do something productive and study, but I never do.

Our mornings suffer no conflicts of television usage. I get up late, sync my podcasts walk the dog, and then check the news on the Internet. She gets up, talks with friends, maybe watches the news, and helps cook lunch. She heads to work after we eat lunch together. She doesn’t watch much television in the mornings, so I could play video games if I was in the mood. If she needs to use the computer, this is when she does it. If we had a second television I’d never use it for actual television watching. I do all of that on the computer.

We’ve got our little system worked out, and it’s pretty good. However, I wish her dramas were on an hour early so I could get the occasional game of Wii in before I went to bed without staying up super later.

Korean archer recreates the “Robin Hood” shot. Koreans are dominating the Olympic Archery competitions. Who knew?

I went to hang out with a couple of foreigners and play Magic the Gathering. We all get along very well, but people that work together have to occasional drama issues involved in things inside and outside of the office. Since I tend to work at very small schools with little to no foreign teaching staff, I’m more or less immune to that sort of stuff. I sometimes get this feeling there can be drama that pushes peoples lives in one direction or another, and I’m just a solitary rock, unaffected by most of the tides.

I’m kind of happy that I don’t hang out with that many foreigners when the drama starts to get thick and serious. I’m busy most nights anyway, and when I’m not busy (the weekend), I don’t have the desire, or the money, to go out drinking late into the night anymore. I’ve got my wife, and my dog, and I’m buying an apartment. I don’t need the drama of social politics getting in the way of friendships, or worrying about who doesn’t like who in any meeting. There are all sorts of subtext I miss out on because I’m not filled in on drama, but I’d rather keep it that way than find out all the details and then have to watch my mouth constantly. I’m not good at that.

Hanging out once or twice a month and playing cards or doing something with people with similar interests is awesome. I also like my friendly coworkers, but I don’t imagine spending more time with them. If I ran into them on the street, I’d totally be friendly, and I wouldn’t avoid anyone’s attention for any reason, but at heart, I’m a pretty solitary person.

My wife is the same way. If we go out, we’re probably doing something together. We rarely run around in groups. It’s just our personality styles aren’t outgoing enough to need or want a flock of people around us. It’s not that we avoid groups, it’s just that we don’t call a bunch of people to see what they are up to either.

It’s consistently true that a social, outgoing person six months “off the boat” as it were will probably know more people in Korea than I do. If they go drinking once a weekend and meet a single new person and remember their name, they’ll know TONS more people than I do. If I was living in the States, it’d probably be exactly the same situation for me, so I don’t really worry about it very much.

That being said, there is an advantage to “knowing people”, because you can walk into certain situations with a good guess as to the outcome. The schools around the city I would need to look into to find a job are always blank slates, and I have to walk in and quickly try to grasp their insanity before I commit to employment. I would have walked into a nightmare situation the last time my school and I had a contract dispute and I wanted to find a better jon. Now, knowing people through the grapevine, I have crossed one school that wanted to hire me off the list the next time I negotiate. This is when knowing people really comes in handy.

It’s a balancing act, but as of now I’m negotiating my way carefully and slowly, but successfully.

I have two college friends that are visiting Korea for the first time in two months. Right now they are worried about packing, and all that other stuff you need to ponder about when you have a trip on the semi-distant horizon. They are only here for a week in total, but I’ve got to worry about the Korea specific details and field any questions they might have about the process of getting over here.

So far, the only thing I’m attempting to set up is a tour of the DMZ for us. My family liked it when they came over, and it’s something unique and worth doing if you are in Korea. The thing with the DMZ tour is that it is a half day, but you need to be in Seoul the night before since it leaves so early. Also, after the tour you might have half a day left in Seoul, but you just want to relax. The soldiers try their best to scare the crap out of you the entire time, so it’s normal to need some time to unwind.

Perhaps a trip to the National War Museum, or something else cultural in Seoul would be enough for everyone. I tend to get into Seoul, see and do what I need, then leave as quickly as possible. This trip will be no different unless my friends come up with something different they need to see.

Other than that, we’ve got a housewarming party for our new apartment, and that’s about it for plans. My parents had 10 days in Korea for the wedding and everything else, so we shuttled them around the entire peninsula. My friends have less time, and less money. We want to hang out as much as we can, but I’m not letting them travel across the world without seeing some cool stuff first.

I guess Gwangju is nice for it’s history, but not really a place I know well. A bunch of hills and museums to people that don’t have any attachment to the culture. I always end up at Bulgoksa, which is the prettiest temple in Korea. It may be touristy, but it’s pretty and unique. On my family trip around Korea we also went to rural Andong as well, which is a polar opposite of Seoul. The only difference is that in summer, Andong’s local village is relatively crowded and expensive, while we were traveling before everything was rock bottom prices and deserted. Still, hanging out in a rural village in the middle of Korea is definately a neat thing to do.

If that’s all we can accomplish in 7 days, that’s what it will have to be. Do any readers have ideas of “must see” sights to include in a trip to Seoul, or around Daejeon that don’t require a car? Yuseong spa, Kyeorang mountain, or anything I’ve done multiple times doesn’t really need to be said. I’ve been here so long I’m jaded and don’t really remember what impressed me most when I first arrived in Korea. Anything super pricy or hard to reach will also be out too.

The lowest level class in the school had grown so much in the past year that it had filled an entire classroom and needed to be split into two different classes at the same hour. Due to a scheduling issue, instead of my coworker handling all of the newly created classes, I got the new “pre-reader” class. I had gone a whole year without teaching phonics, and I was pretty used to it. Now I’ve got to adjust to the new students I have that are still learning the letters, the sounds, and how to read.

Starting a new class with 7-8 year old students is rough, because anything you do is something new to them, and you’ve got to get over the “dance monkey, dance” stage with these students pretty quick.My first class, students kept poking me to see if I was “real”. Yeah.

If you speak Korean, they are shocked. If you only speak English, they act like you are from another planet. If you ask them to read, they’ll wait for your prompts. If you tell them to write, they’ll pause after every word as if it was a herculean effort to continue. These are the sorts of things that wear down over time, and eventually they’ll learn what to do in class.

One of the girls, in particular has a wicked case of ADD. I’ll ask her to sit down, and while I am telling her to sit down and face the board, she’ll turn back around to talk to her friends. She’s got different ways of distracting herself. Playing with erasers, talking to friends, playing with her bags, playing with a chair, standing around. Anything and everything but looking at a book and studying. She can’t sit still long enough to read a sentence.

I’ve started using peer pressure to keep her in check. I pause the class and just WAIT for her to realize we are all waiting on her. She’ll get the point eventually. Today she turned around and chatted with her friend so often I asked if her chair was broken. I made her stand up, then I turned the chair backwards. Then I told her to sit down again. I said, “If you always face the wrong direction with the chair facing forward, maybe THIS is the solution.”

Of the five students in the class, when reading any sentence together, one of them will get the word correct while the others will just make sounds. It’s never the same student, and it’s never the same word that they get correct. It’s just that if you flap your gums and make random sounds, EVENTUALLY one of the words sounds close enough to be correct.

This is a pretty big adjustment for me. I complain when students can’t write coherent sentences, or don’t listen to my explanations fully before trying to argue their points. Now I’ve got students that don’t KNOW the shapes of the letters yet. They are very cute, and a few of them try hard, but it’s a challenge to go back to the very juvenille behavior and short attention spans of very young learners. It is rewarding to help them grow, and hopefully when they get to higher level classes I’ll know they were helped by my attention, but right now I’m adjusting.

This was the gift I got. Slightly racist individually wrapped cookies.

This is what my wife got. Eeeewww. Placenta Essence Mask.

When looking for information about the latest Final Fantasy release on the Wiiware service, Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicals: My Life as a King, I disliked the design choices that underpin the game. I started thinking about why I find some games rewarding, and others pointless.

FFCC:MLaaK is a marked departure from the typical RPG. In this game, you play a King confined to his castle. You have to rebuild your kingdom by harvesting the minerals found in the dungeons. This is a pretty cool concept. When I first heard of this, I thought, “It’s more of a resource management game. Neat. SimCity + Final Fantasy + Dungeon Crawling. Awesome.”

In SimCity, you needed to allocate resources wisely, because if you didn’t collect enough taxes, you couldn’t keep the city running for the next year. Then things started getting worse and worse, and you could only hold on so long before something came along and wiped you out. FFCC:MLaaK removed all the “risk and failure” from this model of game design, and I’m scratching my head why anyone would want to play it.

When the idea of FFCC:MLaaK was introduced, I thought that there would be a certain building you needed to build at a certain time to equip your forces with what they needed, and that if your troops were defeated, you’d lose the game. There had to be some sort of time limit driving you to work fast, otherwise you could just sending your forces to lower level dungeons to level them up, then clear out harder dungeons easily. If there is no consequence for failure, like the inability to raise taxes in SimCity, why continue?

Instead of controlling the people you send out to collect the materials (AKA, gain income on your own) in the dungeons, adventurers simply send back reports from the dungeons. If they come back with the materials by killing the boss, success. If they fail to defeat the boss, they come back wounded and need to rest for several days before returning to a dungeon. There is no time limit for when quests must be completed. There is nothing you can do to change the outcome of beating a boss to get income for the kingdom other than leveling the troops by sending them to easier dungeons. The only other way to use money is to donate it to the buildings in town to make better items to increase their chances of succeeding the first time.

Later, you can group the troops in different configurations with skills and medals to support each other. They still fight on their own without your help, but they pass or fail as a group. If you give them medals for achievement, you can manipulate statistics to further increase their rates of success. You still don’t directly control them. Your are the king in the castle. You don’t want to soil yourself with the “adventure”. You get to construct buildings that influence the townspeople. Now THAT’S exciting.

There is no danger of going too slowly. There is no benefit to going quickly either. Finish fast or slow. It doesn’t matter. Fail a quest? Try again. It doesn’t matter, you aren’t actually going to the dungeons, your adventurer proxies are fighting for you.

Beating the game opens up “New Game+”. The only difference here is that the higher level dungeons take a longer time to open up. This means that as long as you put time into the game, eventually the troops you are sending will level up and defeat the boss. Any outcome of the resource scarcity introduced by the game is handled by the game itself. There is no strategy, because all you have to do is try again and your chances will increase each time because your adventurers level up between battles.

You can make the characters in the game happier by building bakeries or parks. This might make it easier to beat the game, or not. I guessing you’ll need to build each item possible to progress through the game, because that justifies the quests into the dungeon. Each demand of residents means you need to continue with the questing portion of the game to get more resources. The resources you get are determined by the adventurers you send off into the dungeons, but don’t actually control. The game demands something, then gets it for you if you’ve played long enough.

All you do is press a button to complete the loop. It is basically masturbation in video game form.

Basically, the lack of consequence for failure or strategy mean the game is entirely pointless. I play games that have heavy consequences for failure (roguelikes= permadeath of characters), or heavy strategy (Magic the Gathering). Removing one of these elements of game design can still be fun, (card games without keeping score) but I can’t wrap my head around someone who would want to pay money to play a more active version of Progressquest.

When I asked about the gameplay for some clarifications to see if there was more of a point, the best response I got was, “All RPG games are just time sinks. It’s joy to play and looks pretty, and isn’t that enough?”

If I don’t control the outcome, and there is no strategy involved in the game, no it’s not really enough for me. It is pretty. The character art has a good design. You can even pay more to buy new costumes for your characters that do nothing. There are new dungeons to download, and different races to unlock, but you never actually fight to acquire the resources you need.

If there is no gameplay of consequence, why do I care?

I. don’t. get. it.

(EDIT) It’s been brought to my attention:

Some quests can only be defeated by certain classes, so you need SOME strategy in troop deployment (AKA, Reading a report to know why the person you sent before failed, then sending a different class.) If you fail a mission 13 times, you don’t lose the game, but there seems there is a Ranking system based on how you completed the game.

There IS a consequence, however slight, for being faster and or better at completing the game. You get graded on the happiness, speed, and other factors of how you managed the kingdom. Getting a better score MIGHT even unlock different content, but no one knows. There is a “point” to completing the task, if you play a game to get a ranking.

Last week I noticed that I didn’t have my ATM card in my wallet anymore. Odd, since I had kept this particular card for several YEARS, often going a year or more without using it. It was always there just in case I needed it. I talked to my wife, who knew she hadn’t moved it for whatever reason. Uh oh, time to cancel the card.

While we were skipping around to different banks to find out loan rates for the house, I decided this would be the perfect time to make a new ATM/Debt card. Since I never use my card to actually withdrawl cash, if I actually needed to purchase something I didn’t have money for, an actual card to spend from would be better. Whenever foreigners deal with banks, they bring their foreigner card, as well as their passport. I grabbed these two legal necessities and headed out the door. After we got the needed info and signed for the card, we headed to Emart. I picked up my WIFI router. We dropped into a realtor for some paperwork, then headed home.

Last night, we got an automated response about my debt card. They needed my passport number. Odd, since we had BROUGHT my passport with us to the bank. My wife asked, “So, where is that passport. We need the number.

“Where is the passport? I thought YOU had it,” was my reply.

Uh oh.

Yesterday night we spend an hour or two tearing the apartment to pieces. We checked all the newly laundered clothes. No, it wasn’t in the wash. I checked every coat, bag, and book in my computer room. No where. My wife checked our legal documents drawer where all the paperwork is usually kept. Nothing. We found HER passport, and all HER documents, but mine was still nowhere to be seen. I found a copy of the passport info I kept for emergencies, but not the real thing.

We retraced our steps and hoped for a miracle. We headed back to the bank. They took down the number from our copy of the passport and told us that if they had found the real passport, they would have called us. No luck. Next we went to Emart. There was a list of all the items they found each day at the information desk. They find a LOT of stuff in that store, but not my passport. The trip to the real estate agent was fruitless, but extra awkward because we had signed a contract with the real estate agent across the hall, meaning they had lost out on the commission. No wonder they hadn’t looked very hard.

The bad timing of everything freaked me out more than anything. Losing a bank card AND a passport in the same week? Was I getting senile? Was I being robbed by a very patient identity thief? What the heck was going on?

We returned to the house and proceeded to tear it apart again. We have a small house, so looking involved checking the places we looked at before. We went through the computer room, and started looking back through documents. My wife got in touch with the bank and started to move funds from my account over to hers just in case of fraud resulting from my missing document.

We hadn’t found anything, and I was already looking at how hard it would be to replace the passport. As long as we had a copy of the information provided on the passport, as well as a police report, made an interview, paid a large fee, had all the places I had visited outside of Korea, and made two trips to Seoul, I could probably have a new passport in two weeks. Gee, it’s almost TOO easy! I was resigned to having to call the cops and start on this process rolling. Once we reported it missing, we couldn’t stop until we had a new passport, as it rendered the old document invalid.

I picked up a pile of documents we had sorted through to put them away. Wherever the passport was, it wasn’t in the house…then something plopped on the floor from the pile of documents. I thought it was just my wife’s passport, till I noticed it was blue. ASSA! I FOUND IT!

There was a huge sigh of relief, then an angry scowl from my wife. “NEVER DO THAT AGAIN.”

No kidding.