::A Geek in Korea::

One of the old school Korean blogs I used to like to read was Fatman Seoul, which was a man who traveled around to different Korean restaurants and took pictures obsessively about the different dishes you could try out. That blog died when the author left Korea, and there was a Fatman shaped hole in my blogging since then.

Little did I know, but the original Fatman Seoul was the inspiration for ZenKimchi’s Food Blog, which I also subscribe, which does a lot more daring food that I would never, ever want to try. (Seriously, eating Skate? EW!)

Now, FatManSeoul is picking up where the previous FatMan Seoul left off. They even gave props to the original blog in their mission statement. That’s awesome. They are basically doing what the old Fatman did, trying out food, taking pictures, and finding weird products you’d never see elsewhere, like cheese flavored milk.

The number of wonderful and unique foods in Korea are so diverse that it doesn’t surprise me that different food blogs have popped up to fill people in on the details. I feel like Korean food is a well kept secret that should be shared with the world. The more that people know about how delicious Korean food is, the more opportunities people will have to learn about Korean culture, and that’s what this blog is all about.

It’s not like I have the iron stomach it takes to eat all the stuff on Korea’s plate anyway. I’ll let some far braver souls experiment, and I’ll just try out anything that looks good when I get my chance.

So, the last D&D game we played ended up taking place in my house. Our DM had made up a quest that sent us to a far reaching area of the map of the world, and we fought cultists and demons. We have TWO assassins in the party that poison everyone in sight now, and my Warforged Juggernaut has acquired one of his new parts to allow for new followers to join his growing army.

My character even put the finishing touches on a demon with a new über-powerful sword I wield. This new sword is totally bitchin’, and really, really evil. It compels my character to slaughter my victims and harvest their souls, or face madness and rage. How awesome is that? Hell, it’s +3, so it’s worth the evil madness from time to time. Just stay back if I start shooting demonic steam out of my body and get out of my way.

Anyway, our DM was dropping hooks into the game for all sorts of different adventures in the future. Since the game sort of revolves around and people take turns writing the next chapter, I thought I’d give it a shot. Since we’ve only got one other player that regularly DMs, it’s usually between the two of them to write the next chapter we’d act out. I decided that I liked one of the twists the DM thrown in for the last game (I totally called what the twist was going to be!), so I could write a sort of “mini” adventure that would get us to the next level. That way I could get my feet wet into the process of being a Dungeon Master for the first time, and if it went well I could do something in the future more easily.

Right now, I have the general idea for the adventure, and the “hook” to get the adventurers into the area we’ll be exploring, but I don’t know how to actually PLAN, SET UP, or EXECUTE my idea fully. The real “DM” said he’ll help me with the mechanics of running the campaign while setting it up so that I don’t kill all of our characters accidentally with an out of depth monster beyond our skill. I don’t know everything that goes into planning an adventure, but they make it look very easy. I think I’ll try integrating a few of the puzzles and word tricks I enjoy into some traps. Some of the matchstick puzzles give me a really interesting idea about how to set up a dungeon already.

Right now, I’ve got to read the Dungeon Master’s manual, get a grasp on the basics, and start customizing my adventure. This is a first for me, so I’m not sure how much of a task I’ve bitten off for myself. I’ve got a four day weekend coming up to get the stuff set up, so hopefully I’ll make an entertaining story that keeps us occupied for an afternoon. I’ll still learn the mechanics even if I fail at setting up the entire adventure by myself, so hopefully there won’t be anything too bad about the whole process.

Right now, in the Writing and knowing nothing of the details stage, I’m totally excited to try this new thing out for the first time. I’m not exactly sure how strong my story telling, dice rolling, and “filling in the gaps as I go” skills are at the moment, but I’m going to do my best to tell an interesting tale.

For the first seven plus years of my stay in Korea, life was hard ordering a taco, baked potato, or anything else that requires a creamy, non-sweet component in a dish. Sure, you could easily find SWEET cream, or butter, but their are things that require certain kind of cream to make them go down correctly.

At long last however, residents of Korea can smother their nachos in calories and fat like the rest of the world: Sour Cream is now available at supermarkets in Korea. It’s available in 970 gram tubs only (A LITER of SOUR CREAM!?), which mean that if you want to buy sour cream, you need to be fully devoted to the enterprise if you want to finish it all before it goes bad.

Right now, we’re finding excuses to eat as much sour cream as possible. Nachos, dips, and mash potatoes will be getting made with heavy doses of the liquid. It’s like The Ring, except we’ve got seven days to finish the sour cream our we’ll die….of deliciousness.

We moved into our apartment a few weeks ago. We probably haven’t been the best neighbors in the mean time. We started by remodeling the house until late into the morning. We’ve had a house warming party with a large number of people. I’ve invited people over multiple days to hang out, and frequently have guests visiting and leaving. We have a noisy dog that yips a few times the door to our apartment is opened. All in all, we’re not the quietest neighbors someone might have.

All of this means that the neighbors below, above, and across from our apartment needed to be given a gift. This is a typical Korean custom when you move into a new apartment. You are supposed to appease neighbors with high quality rice cakes, known as “ddok“, but we aren’t going out of our way to find an upscale place in our neighborhood. We wanted to get it done today, when everyone was probably at home.

My wife called her mother, who told us that if we wanted to give a gift of some kiwi fruit sets that would also be acceptable. I was sent out to collect the kiwi sets, and we got enough for all the neighbors we share a wall, ceiling, or floor with. Thankfully we didn’t have to deal with any of our crazy nosier neighbors.

The upstairs neighbors are an elderly couple. They came to our apartment today because something that the Internet guy did to the wiring messed up their cable reception. They had a cable guy visit our apartment to fix whatever was wrong with their cable. Oops. They earned their kiwi by being unable to watch television clearly for a few weeks because of us, on top of all the remodeling noise we subjected them to. We had no idea about the television reception, of course, so when we gave them the kiwi to apologize, they were surprised. They weren’t expecting a gift from us.  We warned them that we might make noise in the future, so please don’t be upset. They seemed nice.

The downstairs neighbor family is moving soon. We met them on the day we moved in because the previous owner needed to fix some water damaged caused by the laundry room floor. We had to survey the damage to their apartment, and they mentioned that they’d be moving in the next few months. We went down to hand them their kiwi and their 20-30 something year old daughter answered the door. She said they were moving in a month, and would pass on the whole, “Upstairs apologizes if they are noisy” warning to the new owners.

The next door neighbors have two kids. They were more curious about us as a couple, and me as a foreigner, than what we had done to our apartment. Their kids were poking their heads out to look at their new English speaking neighbors. The lady was asking if we were newlyweds, and where I was from, where I was working, etc. We said we had been inviting people over fairly often in the past few weeks, so we didn’t want her to be annoyed from the traffic visiting our floor. She said it wasn’t a problem that she noticed, and that she was glad to finally meet us.

This is more to meet the people living around us than what we did living in the previous two apartments. I’ve actually run into a set of twins I had as students at a previous school that live in the same apartment elevator line a few floors above our apartment. They were as shocked to see me leaving my apartment as I was to see them walking into the building.

“Uh, Hello girls.”

“Teacher, what are you doing here? This is our apartment building!”

“Yeah, I live here too now.” (pointing) “Yeah, I bought that apartment right there. Seeya!”

“Waah?! Shingihada! (Surprising! I can’t believe it!)”

I guess as I meet more people I’ll get that reaction for a while. Eventually they’ll get used to living with a foreigner in the building…. right?

There are lies, and there are LIES. Several of the podcasts I listen to do the “Gigantic Lie for Humorous Effect” sorts of skits. Several of them are nothing but “Gigantic lies” that the people that they never admit to lying. The lyingest podcasts I listen to are:

The Bugle this podcast is basically John Oliver and Andy Zaltzman lying about the news to one degree or another. The general format of this show is “Report something true, top it with a lie, then actually report something else that is true, but so unbelievable it SHOULD be a lie, but ironically isn’t.” It’s like the Daily Show, but with less reliable sources and no video tape proof. Occasionally Andy Zaltzman will simply lie for long periods of time and see how far he can go into the realm of unbelievability.

The Onion The Bugle might be a fake political news show, but the Onion is an entire fake news network. I listen to the Onion Radio News, which has short, one minute news headlines that are always outrageous lies. The Onion News Network is also great, if only it supported my video player format.

You Look Nice Today is a show where several funny people sit around, bring up a premise like, “New Mixed Drink”, or “New Website Domains that should exist”, and just try to top each other in ridiculous and or funny things concerning the topic. The best part of this is that they follow the improv model of never rejecting a premise, and simply compound and build on everything put forth. This is a new show I’ve only just started listening to, but they have an irreverant attitude that made me smile.

Jordan Jesse Go! is a hit or miss “Two guys talking with the occasional guest” podcast. They do the “Everyone knows XYZ is true” sorts of claims that can start to get perposterous. These days I’ve been a bit annoyed by their hipster “We’re not hip on politics” stance that is starting to grate on my nerves. Usually this show can deliver a few laughs when it stays irreverent and silly, but it will occasionally veer off into an awkward territory that makes me annoyed. It’s still a good thing to listen to when I need a laugh however.

I don’t know why I enjoy listening to people lie. I detest meeting people I know who lie in real life. I guess there is some sort of ironic enjoyment I get out of getting “news” from a place I know is lying to me at the same time.

Courtesy of SFSignal.

Copy the list and BOLD the movies you have seen. Post yours in the comments, or on your own blog.

(Thanks Cobalt)

Metropolis (1927)
A Clockwork Orange (1971)
Brazil (1985)
Wings of Desire (1987)
Blade Runner (1982)
Children of Men (2006)
The Matrix (1999)
Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981)
Minority Report (2002)
Delicatessen (1991)
Sleeper (1973)
The Trial (1962)
Alphaville (1965)
Twelve Monkeys (1995)
Serenity (2005)
Pleasantville (1998)
Ghost in the Shell (1995)
Battle Royale (2000)
RoboCop (1987)
Akira (1988)
The City of Lost Children (1995)
Planet of the Apes (1968)
V for Vendetta (2005)
Metropolis (2001)
Gattaca (1997)
Fahrenheit 451 (1966) (Read the Book)
On The Beach (1959)
Mad Max (1979)
Total Recall (1990)
Dark City (1998)
War Of the Worlds (1953)
District 13 (2004)
They Live (1988) (Will see soon)
THX 1138 (1971)
Escape from New York (1981)
A Scanner Darkly (2006)
Silent Running (1972)
Artificial Intelligence: AI (2001)
Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984)
A Boy and His Dog (1975)
Soylent Green (1973)
I, Robot (2004)
Logan’s Run (1976)
Strange Days (1995)
Idiocracy (2006)
Death Race 2000 (1975)
Rollerball (1975)
Starship Troopers (1997)
One Point O (2004)
Equilibrium (2002)

This is my favorite type of genre film. I can’t wait till I finish reading “The Road” and it is released as a movie.

In a few of my classes, a topic about the Internet was something we had to discuss before the students left for the day. Korean students take ethics classes that are basically “Korean social ettiquette 101″ in their elementary schools. I’m under the impression that they need to do the same thing for the Internet as well. I’ve long complained about the poor design of websites in Korea. This new complaint is about how my students view freedom of speech on the Internet.

One of the core principles of Korean ettiquette that foreigners really struggle with in Korea is called “nunchi”. This is basically “social harmony”. For example, when you are in a group and other people express a fondness for a certain movie you hated, you are expected in some Korean circles to either withhold your opinion, or even to go as far as lying to make the rest of the group happy. By expressing a contrary opinion, it disrupts the social feeling of the group.

This isn’t “Debbie Downer” sort of stuff either. Everyone is expected to go along with the groupthink to keep opinions from clashing. This is one of the worst things about dealing with very conservative Korean people. Having a consensus is more important than factual truth (e.g. Mad Cow disease hubbub.) Most Koreans I know hate this phenomenon, but won’t speak up to to say anything about it for fear of running against group opinion, thus perpetuating it with their silent acceptance.

The example in class was about a blog hosted on Korean service providers sites like Naver or Cyworld. On these sites, people can post their opinions on topics in publicly hosted blogs. The question was about Korean websites policies to remove posts when someone in the comments complain about how the comment was insulting, or hurt their feelings in some way.

As a long time blogger, I reacted with shock to discovering this. “Naver pulls the blog post if you complain in the comments? Seriously?”

Several students said that they thought this was a good idea. “If someone says something that hurts me, I can get it removed. People can’t say bad things I don’t like, so that’s good.”

WOW.

I know I’m arguing with elementary and middle school students, but seriously? Do they not see the consequences of supporting this idea? This would basically destroy all discussion on the Internet if the rest of the world followed this model. Moderated discussions are fine. You can set rules and force people to stay on topic. You can delete posts that are irrelevant, or that add nothing to a topic being discussed, but ANYTHING that offends ANYONE?

In any exchange of ideas, people run the risk of being exposed to information you don’t like. Removing anything that SOMEONE found offensive, for ANY reason basically stops the conversation entirely. I can’t be sure that what I am saying doesn’t offend you. Hell, I’d almost be certain to offend something with this very sentence given enough readers. You can’t worry about if people are going to be offended during the free exchange of ideas.

You certainly shouldn’t need to self-censor if you aren’t violating any laws or threatening public safety. The libel laws are very strict in Korea, to the point of absurdity. That is why this sort of comment system has to be enforced. There are so many terrible, terrible blogs, and no one has the time, or the patience to monitor them all, so I doubt it’s very effective.

I would hate it if a blog said hateful things about me. If what was posted caused physical danger for myself, I could understand wanting it to be removed. That is about the only time I could support such a system. But take down anything I found objectionable? That’s ridiculous.

It’s one of those issues you just have to deal with on the Internet. There are trolls, they say bad things, DEAL WITH IT. I’m not inviting trolls to shit everywhere but really, get a thicker skin about comments on the Internet.

Oddly enough, when students go on their summer vacation, it’s actually the busiest time for teachers in the English academy business. I’ve now got my morning classes for the next month set up, and we’re dealing with the headaches of adding new classes to the database at work. My normal classes have all been bumped up and I finish early. If I had my choice, I’d actually take this schedule all year round, extra hours and all. It’s a far cry from my first intensive class at the school where I was in so many classes I was babbling nonsense by the end of the day because my brain was nearly fried.

I wasn’t around when they settled on the curriculum for the new classes. It’s a very interesting new challenge that they’ve prepared for the students this time around. Instead of picking a horrible book and trying to make the students speed through it with lots of homework, they’ve combined all the different torturous books with serious English tests in them into one über-test book. I am responsible for testing students CONSTANTLY for the ENTIRE Month. Seventy pages or more of CONSTANT testing! I did my best to keep it interesting. I had my students laughing as I worked through the first TWO pages in our first class.

Today I had the joy of doing a series of long math questions written in English that are on some ridiculous elementary school tests in Korea. These questions are very long on setting up and figuring out, but very easy to actually calculate if you know all the vocabulary. It’s one of those “Trains leave at X time, traveling at Y speed, and if they arrive at this time, blah blah blah” sorts of exercises. Mostly it’s an excuse to make student waste a lot of time only to fail with a trivial mistake because they don’t know what words like “Trio”, “Half a Dozen”, or “Ratio” mean. The people that design these tests truly hate children on an entirely different level than normal test makers. The material we’ve compiled is like the testonomicon, a book of pure evil tests that devour the souls of all that attempt to complete it.

We walked through every step of the problems, and the students are totally better at them than I was when there were raw calculations involved. The only problem they had was trying to figure out what the actual problem was asking for to choose the right answer. Luckily, in both of the classes I worked out the problems I got answers that appeared on the test, so I must have done them correctly. Thankfully I only teach basic arithmetic vocabulary in most of these questions. If I ever have high school equivalent questions for geometry or calculus, I’ll be in trouble.

It’s like appearing on “Are you smarter than a 5th grader” except the students are all billingual and can do advanced math way better than I could ever do in high school, let alone elementary school. Luckily those two pages of English-Math questions are finished, and I can go back to explaining the subtle differences in vocabulary that leave the students baffled and rescue my dignity.

This weekend I got a chance to get back into Dungeons & Dragons after a few months of incompatible schedules. Our secondary DM set up a hack and slash mission that got a fourth player interested in joining us. This new player had a psychotic gnome, who’s first action was jumping out of an airship, having his parachute fail to open, and land on the ground nearly dead from the impact. Awesome.

Since this was a “secondary” sort of campaign, more or less “filler”, my story line as the ascending “Lord of Blades” didn’t get advanced directly through the DM’s actions. What did happen was that we, as a group, slaughtered nearly an entire goblin army without reinforcements.

At one point, I had an epic cleave streak going. I had used my barbaric rage to boost up my stats, then SLAUGHTERED dozens of goblins. Before my streat, we were at the point where the party was surrounded might even need to retreat to protect it’s weaker numbers. Then I started rolling kill shots and it was a bloodbath of Brock Samson proportions. We went from being surrounded by Worg riders to putting their forces into a panicked retreat. While everyone did their part to keep the party alive, everyone was yelling “HOLY SHIT” when I started slaughtering dozens of goblins a turn. I certainly felt like the bad ass tank character they hoped for at that moment.

Due to the epic slaughter, I got to level up once again. I took a new feat, Leadership, which means I can start to gain followers. This was a story line decision as much as it was a player decision. I like the direction the DM wants to take the character, and I’m embracing the whole “Will lead his people to a glorious future battle” thing we’ve got going on. Picking Leadership was cool, because I got to pick up a new secondary character to play in addition to the bad ass killer I play now. This new follower got to be anything I chose, and I got to fit him into the story line and play a different style character.

Since I’m the aspiring “Lord of Blades“, hoping to slaughter those of my kind to acquire my original parts and get new abilities, Pokémon style, I naturally decided my companion was going to be a fellow Warforged. For contrast, instead of an armored badass, this one will be weak, trying to perfect his body and become more humanoid instead of more monsterous like my other character.

I decided to go a comical route with his class. Since he is supposed to be a loyal follower, I decided he’d be my bard, singing my praises to the unconverted masses. “Brave, brave, brave Sir Robin…” Since the Warforged are humanoid construct beings, I decided the theme would be “Terminator with a guitar”. He’ll carry around a guitar and assult our enemies with awesome 80’s glam rock. He’ll play songs to boost my party’s stats and try to lure monsters into his power ballad thrall.

I’ve emailed the sheet I used to create him to the DM, and it’s getting worked into the next play session. This new character is a complete 180 from my main “Story Line” character. I’m already imagining all the trouble this new character will bring about by being this rocking bard. As much fun as slaughtering everyone is when the dice roll your way, it might even be more fun to have a sillier character sitting around too.

A writeup of our trip from my friend that I took around Korea.

This is the blog of one of the people I toured around with in Korea. He’s written up a daily trip log from his notes, and even took pictures of the historical and religious sites we visited. Give his blog a read if you want to know where I take people on tours, how they feel about the sites they see, and a long time reader’s first impression of actually visiting Korea.

Also, he totally refers to me as Torgo, even though he knows my real name. Awesome. Anyway, from the read it sounded like he really enjoyed the trip, and that I made a pretty good host. I’m glad they felt their money was well spent. I know it was fun for me too.