::A Geek in Korea::

We made our run to the embassy and got the paperwork finished. The same unhelpful surly security guards giving orders but not giving any time for compliance. The same long lines and piles of paperwork. The same long waits. It was frustraiting because they didn’t reliably have any rhyme or reason for calling people up after you paid for embassy services, so you didn’t know if you needed to be present, or if you had time to say, feed a hungry baby before you would be called. My wife had just gone into the bathroom thinking she had some time when we got called. I ran over and knocked on the bathroom door to tell her to come out on her instruction rather than wait longer. We weathered the long lines and the paperwork, and I can say that Glow is on her way to dual citizenship now! Mission accomplished, before lunch even!

The best decision I made was to beg for a chance to visit the Kyobo bookstore a block away from the American Embassy. We visited it on the condition we could find a quiet place for the baby so that she and her mother could recover while I shopped. When we walked in the door, a lady pointed us to the infant room, which was a private area just for this purpose. It had a crib, drinkable water, and private changing stations in a small corner of the store. You’d never know it was there unless you were told about it. It was perfect! I got to go pick up a few books, since I so rarely go to Seoul or come in contact with a decent bookstore, and Glow and her mother got to rest. Had this room not been there, it would have been a hellish dash to the subway back to Seoul Station to catch a train.

We only had one person try to come up and touch her while we were stuck waiting for a train. A strange woman peeked beneath the blanket covering part of her face from the sun to show her  granddaughter Glow’s face. People attempt to take a baby out of your hands just to make silly faces sometimes, or comment on the weight, or amount of clothing being worn by your child. Complete strangers try to hold your baby. It always brings out the “Angry Papa Bear” in me. It was a bit nerve wracking to be approached by a elderly stranger. I was just about to rise up and remove this threat when she walked along with her granddaughter. She didn’t try anything funny, but I’d prefer it if she just hadn’t even looked at all.

The word on the street is that Glow is an adorable baby. While I was carrying her women would start cooing and going nuts over her in all directions several paces away. The cries of “Oh my, look at that ADORABLE BABY!” was following us down the street as we walked. I guess the “foreign man carrying Korean baby” thing still gets people’s attention. Or maybe she just is that cute. It’s possible.

Normally when I get back from Seoul, I have to lay down for several hours. This is because I have a pounding headache from going to Seoul. Today, there were jackhammers. Not in my head though. Literal jackhammers blasting out concrete in the basement of our apartment. The entire building was shaking! We took poor Yoshi, who had suffered through that all morning, and Glow, and headed to a pagoda in a park for some peace and quiet. It was so loud that you’d damage your ears listening if you stayed inside.

Eventually the construction stopped for the day, and we returned home. Long day, lots of travel, but something got done for once. I hope we can get the paperwork back soon. I’m also free for the rest of the weekend for any other odd jobs or relaxing. Let the vacation finally begin!

Tomorrow is the only thing we have planned that must take place during the vacation. It’s a “family trip” to the American embassy in Seoul. What better way to spend your three weekdays off of work a year than pushing papers for clerks that don’t have any information and don’t care about any of your problems! Any trip to the American embassy is a sure fire way to give me a headache whenever it’s brought up. Imagine the DMV with many more security checks and surly people with much more power.

I spent the entire day trying to parse out the requirements presented for documents for the different things we need to happy for in one form or another. The embassy wants some records I have, some stuff I think I have, and probably stuff I don’t know I need yet too. The last time I was in the embassy for the marriage license, I had to fill out everything in triplicate because they would throw out papers when I didn’t follow their sometimes confusing directions perfectly, when I did follow their directions but was given the wrong form, and just at the whim of the person at the counter. I printed some of the stuff already to save time, but there were so many questions that I needed clarified that weren’t discussed in the document itself that I decided I should just stop before I got more upset trying to figure it all out.

This is why I don’t do my own taxes.

I’m actually applying for a paper certificate so that I can apply for another paper so I can get a final document in eight weeks time. If we’re lucky and I actually bring everything they claim is necessary the first trip, I’ll be happy it’s all done with and the rest can be done through the mail. That’s if we can make it through their lines before they close the embassy.

The fact we have to bring Glow along isn’t going to make it more fun. She needs to be shown to the people when we sign the paperwork. I’m not as germophobic as Koreans are around babies, but public transportation and lots of random weather changes make me sick when I go to Seoul. I can’t believe that a 20+ day old infant is going to benefit from the trip. This is the one bureaucratic thing I need to do that can’t be done in Daejeon, and I have to spend an entire day doing it. I’m lucky one of my three days of vacation this year fall within the deadline period, otherwise it would have been even worse.

I’m really looking forward to getting this trip done. I don’t have a single worry for the rest of the vacation if this goes well. If it doesn’t go well, we can try again the next day. (Ick!)

My director continues to hit all the buttons that still manage to shock and enrage me. I’ve been working with this person for 3 years and STILL she comes up with insane new schemes to demoralize and annoy her employees. Her newest thing is a spin off from her “pay for meals that you didn’t eat” thing. She must have seen how putting a financial incentive behind a terrible policy can make people change their ways. Now that the threat of paying for a terrible meal you didn’t eat is on the table, everyone is prompt canceling their undesired lunch meals before she orders them.

It’s probably saved upwards of a few thousand of won, which sounds like a great deal for management, until you realize that a small coffee and a muffin at a local coffee shop cost three times what the lunch room meals and we all resent having to eat crappy food that was once a nice thing just to be offered.

The new thing the director does is schedule redundant, or irrelevant meetings at inconvenient times, then FINES you if you skip them. The intensive morning classes have two hour blocks of time that finish at noon. A Korean teacher, foreign coworker, and I were set to have lunch, but our Korean teacher that was supposed to eat with us literally had to run out of the teachers room when the director started prowling around. It seems that the director scheduled a meeting at 12:15 that was a mandatory class for all Korean teachers. She gave them a whole fifteen minutes for lunch before their afternoon class prep to eat.

Any meeting that would require Korean teachers getting only fifteen minutes for lunch must have been a life or death training scenario. What was she going over? She was teaching detailed middle school grammar to the Korean teachers. Two of the Korean teachers that were told to attend the meeting don’t even teach middle school! The book she uses is just a set of repetitious drill exercises that the Korean teacher that ate lunch with us politely described as “old, unpopular, and useless.” She got fined for skipping a meeting about something she doesn’t need to learn for a class she doesn’t teach, and it’s not even useful to anyone that was there.

Ouch.

It seems the new school policy is that skipping a meeting cost you money. Failing to post homework students need to do by the end of class cost them twice as much. Failing to grade grammar homework for all students and post the results before the class is over also has a fine. If teachers don’t properly teach the class up to the directors standard, she is under the impression the teacher owes HER some money if the Korean teacher was telling me the truth about the size of the fines. Only in Korea could a director pull this kind of hoodwinking and not have everyone just resign immediately. If people weren’t dreaming of their vacations all day today I’m sure someone would have said something nasty about it. Sedition in the ranks and everyone knows it’s because of this poisonous director/teacher sort of animosity she fosters because of these inane policies.

This is some INSANE bullshit. She has only tried this with Korean teachers, because the foreigners would laugh in her face if she tried it. No one touches my cash! The only reason Korean teachers tolerate this is that the school’s salary is a bit higher, they pay on time, and the qualifications aren’t quite as ridiculous as the rest of the schools in this neighborhood. That’s about it as far as perks go.

For the record, there is a teacher’s meeting I skip every Wednesday because it’s scheduled THREE hours before I’m supposed to need to come in to work. I won’t go in that early if I’m not getting paid for it because I’m busy taking care of my wife and kid. Sorry, those are my priorities, and I made it clear I had a conflict before they started the meetings months ago. The director has nothing in my contract forcing me to come, and I’ve told her that unless she reschedules I won’t ever be there. Even if I work the summer schedule with intensive classes, I only make a half hearted promise to pay attention if I go. If I get fined next week after the vacation this week, I’ll be giving her a piece of my mind about what I think about this new policy at work. I’ve decided I’ve got less than a month left before I hand in my notice. I won’t be staying past my contract, so I’ll be looking for new schools shortly.

You can’t deal with people like this. It’s just too far from reality to deal with someone that thinks negative reinforcement of employees is better than common sense.

Summer intensives where I have to wake up early in the morning to teach are some of the few classes that feel like “work” to me. Usually I am thrown into a class of completely new, or different students that don’t know me, I have no choice of book or material, and I suffer through the class for a few hours before going home tired for a few hours, only to return to work later and have to do it all over again in the afternoon or evening.

I’m sure that a few weeks from now, after the grind of work has gotten me down, I’ll feel the same way, but today was the first day of summer intensives and after I was done I sent a text home to tell my wife, “Easy Money”.

Actually, the class was a bit of a challenge. One hyperactive boy and one super intelligent girl trapped in a room with me for two hours straight. Keeping students interested in English when there was a bright shiny day they knew they were wasting by being inside is not an easy chore. Students naturally drift their focus from different things as you study in a 40 minute class. This was three times longer! After the first hour went by, I gave them a short break to wash their hands and get some water. I needed a water break myself after 90 minutes. I’m no longer supposed to bring water into the class with me according to the school’s rules, so I guess I’ll need a break from time to time if they expect me to keep going. My hands are tied and my throat is parched. Deal with it.

Anyway, the book material was overflowing. Two hours into the class and we hadn’t even scratched half the material we needed to cover. I know I had to stretch out the material, but I really wasn’t going to be able to finish it even if I wanted to at a reasonable pace. We did lots of fun stuff as we went. The small class size is a challenge, but the class was very focused on the materials.

The girl in class is the only student to jump three levels in one testing period over three months. She pays attention, loves English, and is incredibly quick to pick up English. The other student in the class is somewhat naughty, somewhat not as bright, and a tad easy to upset. The girl crushed him in a game of memory and he actually cried out of shame. Ouch.

The class went well enough that I’m no longer worried about the next week of materials. I thought I’d be preparing huge piles of materials to fill in gaps, but other than an occasional test I’ll be fine with all the materials in the books on their own. I’m happy I got the students I ended up with, and I’ll be less stressed this summer vacation than any I’ve ever taught previously. Easy money.

For the past month, I’ve been obsessed with two things. My daughter Glow, and Dungeon Crawl. One sort of feeds into the other from time to time. While my wife is care-giver numero uno in our house, whenever I am of no use in caring for Glow, I go onto the computer and play some Crawl. Breastfeeding for Glow is Crawl time for me. Sleep time for Glow is Crawl time for me. Aunts and Mother-in-Laws come to make silly faces at Glow? I’m either doing chores to make them comfortable, or I’m playing Crawl when I’ve been released from chores.

One thing that has resparked my interest in Crawl has been the somewhat recent release of the 0.5.0 version of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. This version of the game moved to SDL, which is nerd speak for “Pretty 3D effects”. While Crawl remains a tile based game, they started using Alpha rendering and transparencies to make the screen easier on the eyes and nicer to look at while playing. There were increases in functionality, as well as bug fixing behind the scenes, but the real thing that caught my eye was the addition of a new race.

The Deep Dwarves are a unique race in Crawl that replaced the Gnome. Deep Dwarves can recharge wands by sacrificing Magic Points permanently, and can map the level of the dungeon without traveling around at the cost of some food. The drawback? They lose all regeneration. Normally after a conflict, characters rest for a certain number of rounds to regain Hit Points. Deep Dwarves can only gain back healing through magical means. They start with a Rod of Healing with a limited amount of charges. Any potions or magical ways of healing are a must for survival. Each attack got a little damage reduction on account of Deep Dwarves being tough, so a light poisoning wasn’t something that could instantly cripple you, but you needed to think strategically about each heal and each encounter. I wanted to try this new race out, which necessitated my move to the 0.5.0 version of Crawl.

When I went to build and install the game, I ran into a peculiar problem. The new graphical upgrades had left the game unbearably slow on my system. A 2D tile based roguelike had LAG. What the hell? How could a game that is as basic as can be cause my computer to grind to a halt?

It’s all ATI’s fault. They made the 3D graphics card I use, but hadn’t released a decent driver for my model in Linux, or so my previous research had uncovered. I was drawing lots of Alpha transparencies and rendering everything with my CPU, which is moderately intensive. Considering the constant redrawing of the screen there was a lot of processing going on in a game that looks relatively simple visually. I was at an impasse. I wanted to upgrade my player experience, but without a better driver I was stuck with the older version of Crawl and poor computer performance despite an upgrade a few months back.

I went on to discover that other people with integrated video driver cards also were having problems, and there was a release targeted specifically at those players of Crawl. I tweaked the trunk version for speed, and it was moderately playable, but not blazing fast. I decided that while Glow was spending all day asleep, this was my chance to try to fix the root problem, finding a better ATI driver to run my 3d programs. I had spent good money on a speedy card that my Brother-in-law had picked and installed, and I wanted to get my money’s worth.

After a lot of searching, I ended up at a page at the ATI website that seemed to have the driver I needed. I went on to install it and tried to configure it. There are whole hosts of options that I don’t understand, but even more difficult was the dual screen monitor set up I use. The proprietary installer would find one screen, or the other, but set them up on the wrong sides of each other. They’d run at different resolutions, and the screens would be so hard to read it’d give you a headache. They’d require a restart or a reboot after changing anything, and there was no knowing when a change might cause a catastrophic failure. Every ten minutes or so I’d walk out, go kiss my wife and daughter on the head and say, “I’ve really messed up the computer properly this time. I’m not sure how long this is going to take to get it back to a usable state. Stopping by to see how it’s going helps me keep calm.”

It was a total pain in the ass. Eventually I got to the point where I had tried and failed to follow a guide and was left with two blank screens that didn’t show anything after the boot up text flashed across the screen. I ran the last ditch “start over from scratch” command I had written down specifically for this purpose, and hoped for the best. I rebooted one last time and got to the log in screen. I stood up, checked on the baby again, and then went for a long walk with Yoshi.

When I got back I went through the basic procedures and managed to get everything working. The 3D acceleration was immediately evident when I booted up Crawl. The game was as fast as the old versions that didn’t use SDL or any of the rendering tricks that made the new version slow. I had to go back and remove some of the speed tweaks I had made to make it more playable. The game was too fast.

I went on to play a Deep Dwarf Chaos Knight of Mahleb, summoning demons and blasting enemies for several hours after I got the game working. I had my second best run of Crawl ever, and now want to play the new version all the much more because I have new races and challenges ahead of me. Now I can run fancy window effects and enjoy the video card I paid for months ago. I don’t want to go bothering with performance tweaking any longer. Crawl is the only game I play at the moment, and as long as that runs fine, I’m totally okay.

Back when I first arrived in Korea, when I would go around town I would occasionally see tall skyscrapers that were nothing but husks of buildings. The metal frames had been built, then abandoned when the Asian Financial Crisis hit Korea. There were these long standing monuments to the break down of capital that sat abandoned while surrounded by other large buildings. No one wanted to spend money to tear them down, and no one had the money to complete them. One building in particular stood in limbo for eight years of my stay. It is one of the tallest buildings in the entire city (24 stories!) and it just sat abandoned. It was a creepy reminder of the temporary nature of prosperity.

Some time last year that building started to be surrounded with construction netting and signs about new work being completed. The building got finished sometime this year, and now the abandoned building that once was is a completed, if somewhat empty skyscraper. There are a few real estate agents selling space, a convenience store, and a wedding hall occupying some of it’s floors, but most of it is just unfinished office space waiting to be bought. This building, as well as a zombie department store down the street will take a long time to fill up, but at least there are signs that the economy can turn the corner if real estate prices go up enough construction companies can finish buildings and people want to start selling space again.

One of my friends got married today in that wedding hall. This is the first time I went into that building that I had long considered a symbol of the Asian Financial Crisis. Turns out, it was really a nice place. The wedding was an atypical affair, in that I actually knew the bride and groom, the service was conducted mostly in English, and was a very small.

90% of the people at my wedding didn’t know me, and would never see me again. They were there just to deposit money back in my Mother-in-law’s hands after she had visited all of THEIR families weddings with people SHE didn’t know. My wedding had 150 strangers all waiting to hit the buffet and only watched for the minimal amount of time needed to get a coupon for their food. It was a profitable affair for our family, but it wasn’t exactly intimate or precious. It was more of an “event” that happened to involve a wedding of two people.

This small, charming, everyone knows each other style wedding has it’s perks. I got to meet the groom’s family, who were very nice Mid-Western American folks. If the “table of honor” had been designated, I was only one table away, and we pushed the tables together and ate with each other after we all got chatting. I even helped them out, explaining all the different dishes around the buffet after the ceremony was finished. The buffet was on par with better buffet restaurants in the neighborhood. It’s probably the best wedding food I’ve ever. There weren’t any grasshoppers, like at my wedding, but they did have a much better selection of food.

My wife couldn’t make it, as she had to watch Glow, but everyone was asking how it was going and wanting to see pictures. We sat around after the meal for another hour and talked with everyone. Eventually I had to excuse myself to go back to my family waiting for me at home, but I’m very happy I got invited and got to attend. I hope their marriage is like that building, in that with patience and luck people can make something solid that will weather any storm, either financial or social.

*(Congrats to my friends that got married. I’m writing a blog, and trying to relate a story about where the wedding took place. Excuse the dramatic title to this post.)

Two days ago, the secretary came into the teacher’s office and said, “Hey, does anyone need any of these envelops? I’ve got a pack I don’t need, and if you want some, just take them from me. Perhaps you could use them in a game of some kind with the students? The teachers thought it was strange, but I offered to take them just in case a game would present itself to me.

Fast forward to today, when I realized that I had nothing to cover in the books I had finished early because of our looming vacation. I needed a classroom activity that would take 40 minutes, entertain 15 kids, help them review, and required five minutes or less preparation time. Am I glad I held onto those envelopes then? Yes! I came up with a game, on the fly, involving the envelops, around twenty five little blank cards, and three dice. I was going to make a variant of the game Clue that the holds on the premise of three sealed items in the envelope.

Originally I was going to have the game be a “people, place, thing” sort of quiz, where the students listed things in each category, then it got sealed up. Students took far too long writing their own cards, so I decided to scrap that part of the Clue game and just choose vocabulary from their book that they knew. The sweet spot seems about five more words than the number of students in the class. I wrote the twenty words in front of the students, one on each blank card, and shuffled them. I selected three and sealed them in the envelope. The game was to figure out which cards were in the envelope.

The other 17 cards were arranged into 12 piles on the edge of the chalk board. These piles were kept secret from the students. Some piles had one card, others had two or three cards. The play progressed as such: I would challenge each student in class to three games of Rock-Paper-Scissors.  Students got to roll one die for each successful game they beat me at Rock-Paper-Scissors. If they lost all three games, their name went on the board for a “Bad Luck” list of shame, and I would gloat that they would never find out the secret in the envelope.

Students that won would roll the dice after the three games were resolved. They could choose any combination of dice that they rolled by adding a combination of dice faces and choose to reveal that clue from the piles labeled from 1 to 12 near the board. If students had already picked that number and there was no combination of dice that would wield a clue, I also wrote their name on the “Bad Luck” list, but wrote (Roll) for their reason. The luck element can easily be mitigated if the game starts to turn out of control. If students have too many words to guess when you get to the end of the Rock-Paper-Scissors part of the challenge, anyone on the “Bad Luck” list could be given a second shot.

After 15 students have revealed as many of the words on the piles as possible, the words remaining on their list now become a problem. There are only three cards in the envelope, but there are usually around five to six words remaining. Each student is then given a blank card. They have to write their name on the card and choose the three words they think are in the envelope. If they were working together to making a comprehensive list of all the clues, they might know all the unrevealed hints and win easily. If there are lots of unsolved clues, they’ll have a very hard time getting it exactly correct. There were always around five words total that could have possibly been in the envelope, and I thought those were decent chances at winning the game.

If it’s a low level class I’ll just tell them the few words in the piles that have not been revealed they should be choosing from.  Since we all started with the same list of words, higher level students need to track their own clues and I write nothing on the board for them. They have to listen, follow the game, and make sure they write down any hints along the way. Students all write down their choices individually, so there are around fifteen chances, one per student, that ONE of them has the right combination written down. I told the students that just like in Clue, they have to find out what is in the envelope exactly, or they don’t win.

If anyone solves all the clues perfectly, they win and get a prize. Originally I didn’t have a prize to offer, but a student came back from a trip and gave me some chocolate. Students saw me carrying around the chocolate along with all the dice and blank cards as I walked from class to class and guessed it was part of the game. Confident that not enough of the students were going to pick the right clues to win this game, I put the chocolate on the line and declared they COULD have it if they got it right. Lucky for me, they all struck out and I got to gloat some more.

The students loved this game. This is a game that depends on large classes, a moderate amount of vocabulary words, and a healthy adversarial relationship with the students. Once the students figured out that every unsolved clue made the game exponentially harder for them to figure out what was in the envelope, they started rooting for each other. The last girl had to roll a specific number to try to get one of the last “double” clues left and was really trying hard to get the support of the class. When she beat me in Rock Paper Scissors the third time everyone in the class went ballistic. She was hero for the day. Then she rolled successfully and got one more clue to help the class. It was great.

The reveal of the last few clues after the students have submitted their guesses, and the slow opening of the envelope really heightened the tension of the class. Some students got their hopes dashed right away, but others had a “Lottery Prayer” going where they had two words correct and just needed one more to win the big prize. It was fantastic to see the other students trying to figure out who was going to win or lose and what needed to be in the envelope for them to have a chance. I think that was important, as it made the game more dramatic.

I thought this game was very fun, worked well for review, focused on team making, listening, and strategic thought. Students needed to work strategically, because if they used high dice rolls on low numbers, they might never get all the clues revealed. Some of the harder numbers had less clues hidden on them, but the students never knew which number was better for them to roll. There is also the fun of facing off in a game of Rock-Paper-Scissors with their teacher. That can get a little tedious for the teacher, but students love it.

Anyway, for something I pulled together in five minutes and developed rapidly on the fly, it’s a new “keeper”. I’m totally going to do it in other classes that have finished their work next week and need a game to kill time. It’s fun for me and the students. If I ever need to “demo” a class in front of other teachers, this is what I’ll use to show off a game I’ve made. I’m that proud of it.

Summer intensive classes start next week, so my foreign coworker and I finally got the primer about what we needed to do for the classes. I had to come in an hour early to work to attend a meeting to discuss the materials. When we were getting trained in Seoul a while back, the person that talked about the Intensive classes said they were extremely easy. The entire month I had been wondering why, because the book series we were using sucked the last time I had to teach it. How would I be able to get anything prepared for a daily two hour class!

It turns out that while the last time I had to teach it I did my best with what I was given, there was tons more materials available they never gave me that makes the class much easier to do. Last time I taught, I got a student book. Now in addition to that I also have a workbook, a teacher’s manual for extra worksheets, and an interactive CD with 20 activities per unit.  This is on top of anything else I want to use in class with the projector or Internet.The class is small and totally manageable too. I think the Korean teachers spending time with middle school students learning grammar have it far worse.

Of course, this school being what it is, instead of following the program like they ought to, they’ve doubled the amount of time per class that we need to use the material. Instead of two hours per unit there is four, but with the amount of material, it should be fine. I’m a pro at the whole “stalling” thing by now anyway.

The meeting also trained us in using the attendance and messaging systems for parents. The evaluation materials seem to be a bit of overkill for a class that’s only a month long, but if that’s what they want to do…whatever. Each day I’ll finish early and have some time to myself to prepare for my afternoon classes too. Thats if I don’t have to run home and help with the baby every day, which I desperately hope is the case. Anyway, summer is just another busy time for academy teachers.

Some friends of ours, who also have a young daughter, will be traveling back to their countries of origins to allow parental units the proper amount of time to spoil and dote on their offspring. There was a plan set in motion by the ladies to get together and hang out with the babies. Since our daughters were born a few months apart, we’ve already received their hand me down items and whatnot. Right now their old Swing-A-Majig plays simple tunes to our daughter when she relaxes in our room. We have some of their old baby clothes too.

Anyway, while the wives are going to be chatting about baby stuff, the guys are going to need to entertain ourselves. I proposed, that since the ladies had called for the meeting, we took that opportunity to play some Magic: The Gathering. The person in question happens to have lots of old Alpha and early cards that are very likely banned or restricted in some way. They probably also cost a fortune. I never got to experience playing a game with any of the very expensive early cards, so I don’t know how different the game might be compared to what is released now. I have a feeling a lot of the cards are a lot more broken because they didn’t have a grasp on how the game might evolve. Since he brought these rare, expensive, powerful  cards all the way to Korea, we might as well play with them, right?

While I expect him to bring lots of fun broken decks to experiment with, my foreign coworker and I have gone about trying to put together something as broken as possible with the cards I currently have in the communal card pool at work. There is a group of particular cards I want to exploit for maximum cheesiness, but it will require dismantling a few decks we’ve been playing with to achieve our goal. I know what I’m going to be playing against is going to be broken, so I’m just going to go all out and make a horrible broken deck on my own too. If I get to play with a wider assortment of cards from his library to also make something powerful from his pile of cards, I’ll be on a much more equal footing. I’m comfortable with pulling cards and making decks, but it will take time to think up combinations with cards I’ve never seen before. The more Magic: The Gathering played in a social context, the better, is my personal stance. The cards are fun, but so is the creativity and the joy of destroying your opponent.

I’ve been itching to play Magic for a while outside of weekly matches at work. Work games are good, but we both know all the cards in the piles by now and rarely get surprised by a tactic unless we go out of our way to make something new. Hopefully when these friends return from abroad gaming outside of work will become a more regular thing. I’m still weary to buy card, but simply because I’m worried my access to other players will dry up. If I know I will be able to continue to play casually for a while, I’d be happy to buy a few packs every once in a while, but with schedules being what they are, and people coming and going all the time, it’s hard to know if the cards you buy now will ever be put to good use later.

(That is, unless someone on the Internet wants to send me more cards they no longer use. That’s by far the more awesome choice.)

Back in college I started reading Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age. It, along with Snow Crash, are two of my favorite novels, probably in the top five. They are revolutionary to think about, and I appreciated their tremendous vision and scope in dealing with the ramifications of technology in society. They have interesting sociological, cultural, and technological implications in nearly every single page. It’s astonishing to think about how much depth and thought was put into the story.

I appreciated the story when I read it the first time a great deal. It blew my mind when I first read it. Recently though, I’ve now started listening to it as an audiobook. Since becoming a father, the book has taken on an entirely different sort of relevance. There is at the core of this book, a discussion of how best to raise a child, and the lengths and sacrifices people are willing to go through to improve the lot of their child. The entire plot, and the various troubles and tribulations the different characters get involved in all start from the desire of a rich man to see his child become subversive and lead a life more rich in experience than her peers because that’s what he thought it would take to give her and advantage and improve society.

I deeply understand that urge now, and think about how I want to provide an education and encourage the intellectual growth of my own daughter now. Glow might only be a few weeks old, but trying to tease apart what role I want to play in her education and how she views the world is very important to me. Glow is someone with a foot in two cultures at once, like I am, but she never was given the choice. Her very existence is a credit to both her mother and I being able to navigate the waters of cross-cultural confusion and find common discourse and agreement as to how we want to live our lives. Glow will have to do the same if she wants to find peace with both the cultures in her family.