::A Geek in Korea::

My wife had to do a test for our unborn baby to test to see if it had diabetes or, as Wilform Brimley would say, the diabeetus. (Woah, it’s a Meme). Anyway, this required there to be a period of time where she didn’t eat,then imbibe some sugary medicine like substance triggering her insulin response. The stuff was this toxic sweet fake orange favor, much like a melted orange sherbet Flintstone push pop. Due to the timing of her scheduled appointment, she had to get up early, eat something before the fasting deadline, take a shower to prepare for the appointment, then go back to bed.

They drew blood at the appointment, but we won’t know the results until later in the week. Considering the first part of the checkup reminded me of childhood flavors of yore, I’ll guess they’ll prescribe Flintstone’s vitamins regardless of the outcome of the test. Why do we entrust children’s nutritional needs to cavemen anyway? Were the Jetson’s big into Soylent Green?

At the ultrasound, I got further evidence to suggest that our baby is camera shy, even in the womb. The baby was contorted in such a way that getting anything on the screen to make a coherent picture from the entire sum of it’s parts was impossible. The doctor said everything looked healthy, and he seems to know what he’s doing. I’m not being glib, I simply don’t know how ultrasound technology works. The only thing I made out on the screen today when we watched was when he turned the monitor sideways in some sort of special capture mode and showed us the bottom part of the baby’s face. I don’t know if the baby has eyes, or a nose, as those were obscured by something else in the picture, but I can definitively say it has very well defined lips…the joys of modern technology! That’s the only new thing I got out of the information presented to us. His cursory glance to check the numbers of fingers and toes confirms that the baby hasn’t formed any extra appendages since the last time he checked four weeks ago. Yay for normalcy!

The doctor has confirmed that he strongly suggests, but doesn’t declare, the gender of the baby to be female. He’s not allowed to state with certainty for another few weeks due to Korean law. Now that were are somewhat more conclusively convinced his earlier hints were correct, we’ve started talking about buying stuff for the baby we had been putting off. We went price point fixing in one of the closer baby shops from the hospital, and someone needs to tell them their prices are completely divorced from reality. Baby socks do not, or at least in my mind should not, cost 10x the amount that normal adult socks cost.

The shopping list the store provided for new parents to pick up things to prepare for their newborn was similarly insane. The baby would have had more clothing an accessories than was plausibly needed in even the most generous estimates. They admitted that the baby would grow out of anything purchased for them in the first month, but they still recommended buying three to five (!) alternate pieces of clothing for everything you need. I’m pretty sure the baby grows gradually, and it doesn’t Hulk out and have the clothes burst off their chest. Of course, the test was for diabetes and not gamma ray radiation. If the baby comes out green with a violent temper, I’ll know we paid for the wrong test and I’ll gladly pay for those extra clothes.

Is this some sort of sick joke played on clueless first time parents to test the limits of their sanity? All the packaging in baby stores is designed to make you feel like buying anything less than the most expensive thing in the store will cause resentment for the rest of the child’s life at their inferior clothing. The “keeping up with the Kims” stuff here is going to be really hard for me to adjust to, and it creeps in so early.

We already started wracking up some gender neutral gifts. We started with some expensive rattles from students, but we’ve also gotten some baby shampoo and skin lotion in just the past few days.

Korea’s lawmakers are following suit with the recent trend of proposing a “Three Strikes, You’re Out” rule for Korean Internet Subscribers. This is allegedly to target people guilty of copyright violations, using a graduated system. There would be a monitoring service of some kind set up to report abuse, with subscribers being cut off from the service for months at a time if found in violation accused. (See recent example, New Zealand.)

If Korea wants to comprehensively sink it’s business competitiveness internationally, this is a fantastic proposal. Korean people do pirate material, but this law isn’t going to be used to solve any of those problems. Things like MegaTV, or Hanaro TV offer legal means to see movies more easily than pirating. Getting those services with more features and better prices into more homes would do more to eliminate piracy than these sorts of laws. Hell, having people be educated about IP laws would probably be a good idea too, since most people here think that purchasing a bootleg DVD on the street corner is a perfectly acceptable thing to do.

Business-wise, this will be a disaster. It’s got too many unintended consequences, and if enforced will have a chilling effect on Korean’s Internet infrastructure, which is a key strategic business growth area. Korea’s entire strategy revolves around people on the Internet using the availabity of high speeds to do work. Does the current piracy law not have enforcement strategies that would make this system better? I doubt it.

Korean movies lose a lot because people pirate their materials ruthlessly, but their gain under this system isn’t going to offset the costs of people being punished unfairly by this new system. Imagine your office gets accused of any kind of infringement by a rival and gets cut off for months from the Internet? PC Rooms will put each other out of business with abuse of the monitoring systems. Their only reason to exist is to provide access to the Internet. How can they be sure that one of their users isn’t from a rival business trying to download something infringing on purpose?

Open access to the Internet cheaply to anyone would be in danger from this proposal. It’s going to push people underground to encrypt and move “off the grid” to get materials they want. Maybe this will have unintended positive consequences as well, but I doubt it. If the average Korean citizen moved to encrypt all their transmissions over the Internet as a result of this law, perhaps this law would backfire so spectacularly it would be worth the aggrevation. Korean Internet security isn’t the best, but if people actually start thinking about their privacy and safety on the Internet, perhaps someone will find a way to fix all of these problems and never give the government someone to step on.

It seems awfully convenient that these sorts of blanket bans would also allow the government to silence a strongly political force in Korean politics: The Outraged Netizen. If someone with a strong opinion on the Internet has to fight against being silenced every time they speak out against the government, suddenly Korea has become a less free place to live. It’s surely only a coincidence that issues like Minerva and the Beef protests that drove Korean politics recently were all organized from the Internet, right?

This is the sort of things Korean Netizens should be pissed off about, instead of jingoistic stuff they usually want to raise a fuss over. I doubt this will get the reaction things I deemed a lot less important did, because it’s not a foreign threat to a Korean’s perceived way of thinking about their country, but an internal threat to the freedoms people have here. If it doesn’t have a catchy slogan or represent some fear of outside foreign influence, will anyone care? Does anyone know how this is being reported in the Korean press?

This is a bad idea, and people should raise hell about it.  I’m not a Korean politics guy, and this isn’t a Korean politics blog, but this threatens nothing less than my lifestyle as a foreign geek blogger on the Internet. I’d be less likely to want to live in Korea if this law was enacted and enforced . I’ll be on the street chanting when the protests get started if this comes to pass.

I spend a ridiculous amount of time listening to audiobooks, news, podcasts, and all things media using my Cowon O2. It’s rare that I don’t have it on me when I leave the house. I walk the dog while catching up on world events each morning. I bring my player to work and listen to comedy shows on my subway trip each afternoon. I fall asleep each evening listening to an audiobook after my wife goes to sleep. When I’m hanging out with my wife outside the house, I don’t wear my ear buds because I don’t want to stifle conversation with her. If we’re talking about something, or I walk in the house, I take them off so we can talk to each other. Basically, any alone time I have with nothing better to do, I’m listening to something.

This has cut down on my quality “Overheard Time“. Most of the amusing things I hear are from students, but I witnessed a good exchange while in Costco shopping with my wife. I was sitting in front of one of the free food samples. We were hitting every single sample available with reckless abandon. I had coffee, diced ham salad, truffles, cranberry grape juice, two different types of wine, three different kinds of Korean meat dishes, and was heading back to my second different kind of bacon when I had to wait for the server to finish cooking the samples. The bacon was maple flavored. It was an absolute garbage cut of meat, nearly all pure fat, but some genius at Hormel had flavored the meat to make it maple smoked. It was like ordering pancakes, and then dipping your bacon into the maple syrup after polishing off a short stack. The bacon was sweet and hit the disgusting amount of fat on each cut very well.

An older gentlemen came up to the booth next to me and started asking questions about the product.

“What is it?” he asked in Korean.

The food service worker replied, also in Korean, “It’s Hormel Black Label Bacon, maple smoked. It’s delicious. Would you like to try some?”

The man replied, “Bacon?”

The food service worker answered, “Yes, it’s samgyeopsal.”

The man answered, “Is it from a pig? Pork?”

The food service worker answered, “Yes. It’s from a pig. Samgyeopsal is bacon.”

The man answered. “Oh. One, please.”

How any Korean person could not recognize the sight or smell of bacon frying a few inches from their nose is a mystery to me. I can accept that someone might not know the word “bacon” if they are older and didn’t interact with foreign foodstuffs, but I thought the need to confirm the animal after hearing the Korean word was pretty amusing.

Back in my first year teaching, there would be lots of evenings when our bosses would take the entire school out for dinner. This was a mandatory meeting of people from work, going out and basically being told, “You must go out and drink with your coworkers.” This served a social purpose, breaking down social barriers and building up a sense of camaraderie with people. It also was a cultural way of impress the foreigners on the staff with the lavish spending and treatment.

I enjoyed most of the evenings I had going out with that group of people. I was a young guy surrounded by a bunch of young ladies, and I was the center of attention wherever we ended up. Everything was new to me, and it was a great way to go out and see things I wouldn’t otherwise know about. There was manipulation involved, as the directors controlled my housing, and they knew if I was home or not by knocking on my door at the school. I lived in the school and had no privacy, but that wasn’t as big a deal as it would be for me now.

My second school had mandatory meetings outside of school too. These were smaller, cheaper, and a lot less fun. The director would drag me around to show me off as a prize as if he had won me in a carnival. I’d be forced to drink with his army buddies, or worse yet, once even be introduced to his mistress. Eugh! This is where the after office dinner and party started to wear thin for me. By this time, I either had plans, or didn’t want to be spending my time with my directors after work because of feuds or business issues. The directors tried to buy off our happiness with lame dinners, but I always felt intruded upon. We weren’t allowed to decline any of their offers, but they wanted to keep it friendly. It was an uneven distribution of power and awkward for me.

My next school had employee organized outings.  We would get together at bars, or see each other on the weekend as an excuse to party. This was a lot less forced. It was more like a group of individuals making plans to go out, and if they ran into each other, all the better. I enjoyed watching my coworkers rock out with their band, or sitting around chatting when we would go to a bar. My wife was included in the conversations, despite being out of her element at a bar. I started cutting back on my casual drinking right around this time, so we were more likely to go to a bar just to see friends socially as a way to relax, not as a way to get drunk and hung over.

My current job has sort of morphed. No business dinners what so ever was one of the perks of the office. We never did anything together socially, which was great for me. I was busy anyway, or had friends that did other things that didn’t include bar hopping, so I got to go home and didn’t bother worrying if I was missing out on something. Occasionally the other people would see each other at a party or a night club, but I only ran into my coworkers on a handful of occasions.

Now, my Korean coworkers are trying to organize get togethers after they leave work. Their schedules on Friday nights are much worse than mine, so they could walk out of class, hit a restaurant, and stumble into a bar right around the time the party was getting ready to start. I’d be forced to either go drinking several hours before they got off work and wait for them to show up, or hang out in the school for several hours. They invited me to come with them, but I declined. The guy looked at me with shock, as if he wasn’t aware of any social convention that would permit me to decline a meeting organized with coworkers. “Sorry, it’s too late for me, I’m going home. I don’t want to go out this time.” Going home and sleeping in the next morning was a far more tempting reward.

My foreign coworker is still going to party with them. More power to him. If he has a great time, he’ll have some more stories to share about his adventures in Korea when he talks to people back home. I’m not as interested in that sort of stuff any more. An occaisonal beer and some chatting is far more up my alley these days.

I’ve developed a dependence on caffeine in the past few months. I drink a single coffee nearly every day. I drink a caramel macchiato each afternoon, which is basically just pure sugar and caffeine. There is a coffee shop that is about the right distance from my house to walk Yoshi, head to a park, and return for a nice walk. If it was raining, or my wife was walking the dog, there is another coffee shop when I get to work that has a membership card that offers a discount after a dozen purchases or so. I’m two purchases away from filling up my second card.

Today, my wife and I went for a walk with the dog. All the time while I was outside, I kept yawning. I went to bed at the same time as usual the night before, and hadn’t done anything that would have disturbed my sleep patterns. I was groggy and wasn’t able to think straight the entire time I was out of the house. She asked if I was going to get coffee. I declined, as she was walking to the bank, and then to get some groceries for lunch. I didn’t have cash on me, and I didn’t want to bother carrying around change if she handed me some money. I was just going to go around the park, return home, and then get my shower out of the way to prepare for my day. ‘I don’t need to have a coffee,” I told myself, “I just like it.”

When I arrived home, I took my shower. This normally is my second step to being fully awake, right after my coffee. My routine is to go walk the dog, pick up coffee, return home, take a shower, then eat lunch. By the time I head out the door for work I’m fresh and ready for the day. Since I had skipped the coffee, I made the shower extra hot and tried to get my blood pumping to my brain without the need for a stimulant.

When my wife returned home with our vegetables needed for curry, I helped her start cooking. The entire time I was standing over the bowl I felt like I was a zombie. Even the smells of curry and the cooking vegetables could not wake me from my stupor. I just kept struggling to stay awake, yawning. I’ve even taken up the habit of announcing my tiredness like Korean people do to my wife. “Pi-gon-ae…Oh, so sleepy and tired!”

I didn’t have the appetite to finish my lunch, so I went to the couch and tried to take a nap. My wife was just as sleepy as I was, and she never drinks coffee. Perhaps all my yawning got her thinking she was tired as well, because she went to take a nap around the same time. Yoshi hopped up on my chest to keep me warm while I dozed, but I had to head to work shortly. I laid down for a short power nap, and when I awoke I felt moderately better than before.

My wife had bought me some milk that had a coffee flavor. It’s a mocha latte in a milk container served cold. I brought it with me to work to replace my coffee shop purchase today, but I put off drinking it until my break. My first two classes were a nightmare. The students had the energy to wear me down, and the mild headache I had wasn’t endearing me to them either.

I’ve quit caffeine in the past when my habit got really bad. If I could go a week and take vacation to break my habits, I’d probably be clean quickly. I’d like to break my dependence on the stuff, but at the moment I’d suffer for my withdrawal while at work. Me being grumpy isn’t a good for anyone.

Anyway, now that I’ve had my milk-coffee substitute, I’m functioning at a more or less normal level. I feel like I’ve got sandbags around my legs and arms, and my normal mental agility to think on my feet in front of a class is somewhat lacking, but I’ve only got two more classes, and one of them consists of me pushing a button on a CD player for an hour. I’ll probably make it through the day without needing to think too hard.

Once or twice a week we are given new schedules to accommodate changes, class additions, or a new Korean teacher. It’s extremely annoying and completely excessive because they haven’t found a way to make any of the schedule’s readable to humans. I’ve got an entire binder of old schedules that show every class in a grid like matrix of all the teachers and ALL the classes. It’s nigh incomprehensible, which leads to more schedules being issued for corrections, which also get shoved into the binder. The corrections are never issued with a corresponding date, or term of expiry, so you never know how long you need to keep the ones around.

I’ve been given one schedule that was made only for me, showing all my classes for the week. I check that against any new schedule they give me, update it, and then shove the new schedule into a pile. Usually there is either a slight correction needing to be made, or none at all on my master schedule. As a result, I have the schedule I’m concerned about, my own, and ignore the “all teachers and all classes” schedules as much as possible. Despite having the option of knowing what all people are doing at any time during the school, I decline, simply because I don’t care. I rarely need to know where to find someone. I keep only a copy of my “master schedule” at home, and I don’t bother trying to keep current with the schedules I get at work every week. The only real importance for my schedule posted on my refrigerator is when I leave and when I arrive home.

Today, I had been fiddling with a Magic: The Gathering deck that I wanted to test out against my foreign coworker. He spent all last week bugging me about playing at work. He must be insanely bored spending all his time in the school, so anything he can do to break up the monotony is good for him. A happy coworker is a good coworker. We have an occasional break that corresponds, and I thought that perhaps it repeated again today. I didn’t know, because I never noted when both of us happen to have a break together on my schedule at home. I know we have a break at the same time at least once a week because we eat together and played cards earlier this week, but I wasn’t sure if there was any other time like that today.

Either way, I knew I had a break, but I wasn’t sure what I was going to be doing. I had made plans to eat at home, so I didn’t need to go out and find something. I had my Magic: The Gathering deck constructed, so I decided to bring that just in case my coworker’s break happened to coincide with mine. I was debating on whether I would be in the mood to design an adventure in Dungeons and Dragons that I had started thinking about. I was going to be designing new monsters and scenarios, so I’d have to bring multiple books and notes for reference. I also needed to find a place to work now that the classrooms were filled upstairs, and I wasn’t about to bring a bunch of game books into the main office. There is no room for even planning a class, let alone an entire dungeon. Even if this was a “fall back” activity I could do solo, I didn’t feel like bringing the books with me. Too much to bring as a contingency plan. I’m sure I could find something else to do if I tried.

I decided that I’d bring the cards so I could keep them at work, but leave the RPG books at home for the day. I didn’t want to bring a backpack full of geek stuff because it was hard to find space in the new office when I left for my classes. No dungeons would be designed today, despite having a few new ideas when I was walking my dog earlier in the day.

Luckily, when I got to work they turned over one of the second floor rooms to me so that I could use it as a makeshift personal space. They didn’t realize that foreigners would like to have a spot with a lock up stuff.  I got an unused room temporarily. It’ll be the next room to be filled with classes when the elementary students finally spill over to the second floor of the school. I’ll just move to the next room and continue until the school is so packed with students it won’t even matter.

Since I was put in front of a new computer, and I’d be the primary user, and I’d have to be using Windows XP (shudder), I got to work installing browsers and other handy utilities that I’d like to use. I spent my break listening to podcasts and cleaning up the computer in one way or another. I didn’t get to play cards, but at least I had a place to keep them so I didn’t need to bring them back home.

Even in my free time at work, I’m trapped by my hobbies, always planning and preparing for when I can do them again. I actually was torn about all of it, like I wasn’t getting all my geeky potential realized by limiting what I was bringing to work. There is absolutely no reason to feel this way. I’m geeky even when I have nothing to do. I really work at my geekiness, but it’s something I enjoy, even when it feels like I should be doing something else.

There was a considerable warming period that occured last week. Two weeks ago everyone was wearing heavy jackets and avoiding going outside. Last week it was like actual Spring, with the toxic Yellow Sand from China, the nice temperatures, and even some actual nice weather mixed in with a little rainfall to clear out the air. I had gotten my wife’s bike out of storage, and was riding around for exercise. Her bike has a basket so that you can use it to shop, and ever since my bike got hit by a car, it’s tended to pop it;s tire every third or so ride. We’re planning to replace my bike later when we both need bikes. Riding a bike is a nice way to get to work or to get around time. I used to do this a few years ago, but ever since the subway got completed, riding the bike across town stopped being as necessary as it once was. Now I usually only do it when running errands or when I have ridiculous amounts of free time.

Despite a warning that we were going to have chilly temperatures today, I rode her bike, collapsable basket on the back and all, to work. I bundled up with my typical late winter wear, gloves, a coat, a sweat shirt, and pants. I would have been plenty bundled if I was only walking to the subway station for sure, but I hadn’t counted on the exercise required to push the bike up the modest slope on the way to work. I generated a sweat when I got on my way pushing the heavier bike around. I was always adjusting the proper length of zipper and collar to present to the wind. My pants were getting pulled into the chains, so I had to peg them to my legs to avoid stains. I was plenty comfortable riding to work after enough manipulations of my coverings to stay ahead of my internal and external heat differences.

The ride home was a different matter. The wind had picked up, and the sky was overcast. The weather predicition I had heard was absolutely correct about the cold temperatures on their way. It was freezing! I rode home as best I could, but I was regretting my decision for a little more exercise. I should have waited a few more days. Tonight there is even a forecast for snow, and I believe it! This is supposed to be the last final push of winter, then spring will return in earnest. I think I’ll hold off on the bike rides till I know for sure how warm I’ll be when I need to get back home.

One of the things I dislike about the new arrangement of the school is the way the offices and classrooms are on different floors for the majority of the day. There is a director’s office, a communal teacher’s office, and a connected secretary bank of computers on the second floor, but 90% of my classes are taught on the third floor of the school where all the elementary school classes are held. This wasn’t a big deal for the opening, because all the classrooms on the third floor weren’t being occupied, so whenever people had breaks, we could hang out and use the computers in an empty room. These extra rooms also served as a place to dump books between classes to avoid going up and down between floors when there was no break time between classes. When you teach a series of classes with no breaks, bringing all the materials with you, or dropping them off on the second floor between a long stretch of class time is really annoying.

It wouldn’t be a problem if we were each given multiple copies of books for each class we needed to store in each classroom. We’re given one set of books for our classes, and we aren’t allowed to share them. One of my Korean co-teachers has a fit whenever I end up accidentally touching one of her books she leaves out on the table. I’d rather use my own, and if I wanted to I could annotate my lesson plans for each page so that my classroom could truly work as a widget in the cog of the school like it was designed to be. In fact, trying to swipe extra books to leave in classrooms will get you in trouble. The sample books we were told to use for our essential materials are now brightly labeled as “SAMPLES”. We’re not allowed any extra copies. The foreigners have  to haul around our materials, but don’t have a place on the third floor to keep overflow materials anymore.

Tomorrow the last classroom upstairs will be filled. There is one more Korean teacher, which means that there will be a full set of classes in use on the third floor. Our break room is gone. If I want to hang out in a classroom, I’ll have to go downstairs to use one on the second floor. I’ll have to go downstairs to the communal teacher’s office during breaks if I want to get my books, because it doesn’t make sense to move into another room downstairs, since the office is closer to the elevators and doors.

I hate using the office because that’s where the Korean teachers make phone calls to mothers when they aren’t in class, and where the copy machines and everything else is crammed together. It’s loud and crowded, and it’s not very good at giving me any way of getting away from the ritual for a little while. It’s not a place you can zone out, or get focused on your work. It’s also watched over like a hawk by our director, the secretaries, and anyone else on the floor. I’m already being recorded anywhere and everywhere I go, the extra surveillance of the other teachers  just ends up annoying me. Unlike the other teachers that spend all day at the school and want to go out drinking or spending time with each other, I’d rather keep my visits as limited as possible to the room for as long as I can.

There is no private storage in the office anymore, only a small cubby hole in a wall to place all personal belongs and book materials for foreigners. The cubby hole has just enough space for books, and a box for teaching essentials if you bring stuff back down between classes. If you go to work upstairs and take your box with you, perhaps you could squeeze a bag in there too. I carry things with me from home to work, like snacks, but I can not fit all three in the space at the same time. These are placed high on the all directly over computer terminals, which makes it awkward for the shorter Korean teachers. They mostly just stick extra office supplies in them. The Korean teachers don’t have to worry about these spaces as a functional thing. The classrooms have a locking drawer used by the teacher to whom it belongs. They can keep their personal stuff with them, while we have to worry someone might go through our things at any moment.

I’ve spent so much time in the teachers room over the years anyway, that I have gone out of my way to avoid being in it. Being available inside the teacher’s room is a reason you might get roped into insipid activities such as “Welcome Time”, where the employees are expected to put on annoying sashes and greet the students. No one is allowed on the phones during Welcome Time, so the school’s phones ring for ten to fifteen minutes straight. The next fifteen minutes are spent apologizing to annoyed mothers about why their phone calls weren’t being answered. It’s a daily ritual in absolutely stupidity that I’ve avoided ever since the first day on the job. My foreign coworker, who comes to work earlier than I do because of his schedule and “full time” status, isn’t as lucky.

The school is filling up with teachers. I don’t know how many students this will add to the schedule, but if things continue, this is a good sign that my hours may actually decrease over time. Eventually someone will have to be hired to teach more foreign classes, and I’ll get removed from the middle school program. I might not like the move to the second floor, but if they get all these classes filled, I won’t have to stick around the school long enough each day to ever need to worry about the lack of privat space.

Due to some confusion, our first bit of the newest encounter had a problem getting organized. It turned out that there was a cancellation, an UNcancellation, and then a game, but only the people that kept their phones charged and able to receive messages found out about it. Also, due to the weather, another one of the players had bailed to play soccer. Instead, we had two players and a DM. The DM was simply improvising his ideas as he went, and was going to try to tie it all in with whatever he had planned when the rest of the group was able to meet. In a sense, this was a “flashback” episode explaining how we got to where we will start out in the actual campaign. It’s a lot like the idea posted on this website from another DM.

The interesting thing about the entire scenario was that the two players, myself playing a Drow Star Pact Warlock, and the Eladrin Swordmage of the other player, had diametrically opposed philosophies to dealing with the world around them. The Swordmage player was a selfish, unaligned player who was only focused on his own path to victory. He followed the whims of a sword he used as his only council. In a time of decision, he would draw a series of lines in the soil, wipe the blood of his latest victim off the sword, and follow where ever the blood told him to go. While this was a nice touch, and true to his character’s origins, it made knowing what he was going to do from encounter to another difficult.

My character, on the other hand, was driven by things beyond my control, helpless to stop the trials he was facing. I said things like, “I sought the guidance of the stars, and signs that the fates were on my side before making my decision to jump into a portal hoping it wasn’t madness guiding me to a cruel fate,” a lot. I also tried to bring some odd mannerisms into the game, but it was tough to find the right words for my character.

I was trying to think of the right things to say at odd times. I knew what I wanted him to do, but trying to find the right way to phrase how my character would react was challenging. When in doubt, I just went under the assumption that he trusted that the elder star god Caiphon had directed his path for a reason, and that while fate was fickle, he would find the path he was being led on by trusting visions, even though the character was certainly insane.

As always, my character was fairly reckless and less restrained than the other players. Because there were only two characters in the party, we were overall far more cautious to get into any battle, and tried to use different means to get through any challenge. We set traps, used skills, and exploited our gear to get out of problems. If there was someone taking bold action, it probably was me, but the other player had a lot of great ideas to get out of trouble too.

We ended up in a town that had some sort of tower of unknown importance. This turned out to be a red herring, and instead we were swiftly notified that we should instead head for a swamp town with lizard men. The eladrin spoke Draconic and could understand these lizards, luckily, so the party didn’t end up fighting downwards to their goal. There was a method to prove the worth of the party to the lizards, and it involved a battle with a troublesome column in the middle of the battlefield that kept obstructing line of sight. The Swordmage’s marking and teleportation stuff was a weird, but it proved useful a few times in battle. It’s going to take time for me to adjust my tactics to work well with the Swordmage’s basics, as this was the first time I had seen one in combat.

My Star Pact Warlock build was mechanically very sound, and luckily for me I had correctly judged from the last time I played that I needed to change up my equiptment to be more capable. I never missed an important encounter power attack with bonuses that I wracked up each battle. This is partially due to my good rolls, but I also maximized my build for to-hit bonuses. It’s only going to increase it’s capabilities to hit targets as I get more feats to increase my chances to hit on each attack. In a few levels, I don’t think I’ll need to worry if my character will be able to keep up or not. My character was putting down people and doing damage often enough that I think I’ll be fine when the rest of the party was added.

The trials the DM improvised were all small encounter scenarios. Kill something and pass a door, or solve a riddle to get by. The best one was a nonsensical Thunderdome like challenge arena that put the two characters in combat with one another. Being a tricky Drow, my character was able to lower the visibility in the arena while as players we hatched a plan. The Eladrin pretended to be dead, and the entire rest of the arena thought that the Drow standing over him with the sword had slain him. The spectators called for his head, so thinking on my feat, I told the DM I was playing to the crowd while trying to stall and look for a way out of the arena.

Eventually some hobgoblins entered the arena to claim the “corpse” and stated that I’d have to cut off the Eladrin’s head to satisfy the crowd. I used my character’s amazing intimidation score to scare the hobgoblins away from the bodies. I then threw a cloak over the feigning companion. Then, dragging the body closer to the door,  there was a big scene. I made a move to strike the body with the sword, but instead the Eladrin teleported away into the now open doorway where the hobgoblins came in just as the blade was supposed to strike his neck. We made a break for it and escaped from the arena without any damage.

Several small encounters later, they party ended up in a room with chanting wizards rasing yet another big bad evil. I decided that I’d try to disrupt the spell by targeting the nearest wizard, but I failed to stop the raising of whatever it was going on in the middle of the room. Isn’t that always the case? Suddenly there was a big bad evil guy trapped in the room with the party, and my Eladrin companion’s bravery faultered.  I rolled an incredible intimidate check again, and actually commanded this newly raised creature into a sort of dialog to start revealing what it knew. I found out later, it was a Lich. I successfully rolled to intimidate a nearly unkillable badass. Awesome.

At this point, I went to the bathroom, and there was some metagaming cross table talk about what was going on while I was away. Someone knew something I didn’t, but because the Eladrin was unaligned, and distrusts my character’s race, I wasn’t getting any help from him. I should have decapitated him when I had the chance. He had also used me as a guinea pig by pushing me inside a portal earlier in the game.

I was weary to trust him, which made a difficult dynamic in a two player game. I was always wondering if the rope I was hanging from over the bottomless pit would be cut, or would I be pulled up and rescued. Eventually we escaped from the lich without a fight and got out of the whole dungeon. There was an extra-planar creature that made some sort of bargain with us that I don’t intend to follow through with simply because it was a plot contrivance to get us to where we needed to be at the begining of the next part of the campaign. We got captured immediately and had our possessions confiscated. We were locked in jail, awaiting the next part of the story.

We got no experience or treasure for our time, which I’ll bring up next time. I totally should get SOMETHING for fighting through all the stuff. The DM and I have worked out an interesting background for my guy secret from the rest of the players, so I’m very interested in seeing where the next bit of the story goes. Next time I hope the whole group can make it though.

Battlestar Galactica is one of those experiences I’ve only had while in Korea. I started watching the show here, and would talk about it with all the coworker’s I’ve had since it started it’s run. It was my water cooler discussion, my speculative “what’ll happen next” show that kept me interested despite the long hiatuses. It’s one of the few shows that had long hiatuses that felt long and painful to wait through. I’ve got lots of time spent with the characters and ideas presented. I love the show a lot, and watching the finale was the highlight of my weekend, just like each other episode was something I looked forward to watching week after week.

For the last episode, I set up a block of time for myself and kept off the computer so that at no time I could have the story spoiled for me. My wife asked me to go on an errand for her, and a heartily volunteered because I had time to wait for the episode to be available. I was in no rush to get back either, and just enjoyed the fresh air knowing it was probably going to be waiting for me when I got back home. I had a few more shows in queue for me to watch today, but as always, Battlestar Galactica was always my weekend treat. It was the reward I kept for myself after working a hard week that I could look forward to enjoying.

Now that it’s gone, I don’t know what I’ll watch that will recapture that feeling of excitement and escape that it brought me week after week. I know people that felt that way about other shows. I felt that way myself when some other shows I’ve cared about went off the air, and things eventually new things fill the void. While I don’t know what that next thing might be, I’ll raise my glass and say a hearty “Thank you!” for Battlestar Galactica for the years of entertainment you’ve brought me.