justinhowe

Enjoy.



Not much new. Still updating the other blog 10badhabits.com once or twice a week.

Don't think I'll be able to cross-post, but if you'd like to follow my new blog via Live Journal I think/hope/believe this feed link might be the way to do it:

http://10badhabits.com/feed/

Honestly I suspect you all already knew this.

I started a new blog:

10 Bad Habits

Please stop by and visit.

If I get it together I'll figure out a way to cross post.

"There is so much weariness and disappointment in travel that people have to open up – in railway trains, over a fire, on the decks of steamers, and in the palm courts of hotels on a rainy day. They have to pass the time somehow, and they can pass it only with themselves. Like the characters in Chekhov, they have no reserves – you learn the most intimate secrets. You get an impression of a world peopled by eccentrics, of odd professions, almost incredible stupidities, and, to balance them, amazing endurances."

Graham Greene

I visited my wife's folks in Jinju. After dinner on Saturday night we were walking around when we spotted this wig shop. Cellphone camera materialized and my nephew asked me to put the picture on my blog.

What is this thing?

1. Mutton-chop Wig?
2. Prosthetic Snoopy Ears?
3. A future social networking site profile picture?
4. (your answer here)

Other stuff:

We watched the new Pirates movie. It was s'okay, but I'd watch Geoffrey Rush floss. Nice to see Tim Powers' name onscreen. Film previews were a mix of S Korean, Usian, and Chinese films.

When did Donnie Yen become the Hong Kong superstar? I'm not complaining, but he was always something of the "other guy" in action pics. Also no one chews scenery like the no-name British actors in Hong Kong movies. I love them. They have three acting styles: Sniveling Arrogance, Arrogant sniveling, and Bombastic Arrogance (with or without slight sniveling).

I finally got around to doing some pen & paper gaming last weekend via chat. It was fun, and not haha-my-character-dresses-like-a-pimp fun, but actual honest to goodness fun.

Gaming via chat worked well. We averaged about three encounters per session. It took four sessions to get through an adventure. (Yay! Four day weekends!) Supposedly there's software that facilitates pen and paper gaming online but the learning curve looks steep to a Luddite like me.

I'd wanted to use a rules-lite system like Barbarians of Lemuria or something, but my player(s) wanted to use one of the Old School Renaissance retro-clones. On the plus side this meant no learning curve and everyone was familiar with the rule-set.

The adventure was Pirates versus Deep Ones with players in the middle. It went well and the joy of having one's players say "Oh @!#$! no!" when some monster shows up never wears off.

The map was made with the free hexographer.

Here's something irritating about learning how to read Hangul: I spend minutes or so sounding out a word only to have it end up being English loan words (B-u-s-T-e-r-m-i-n-a-l), so I then start to expect every word/phrase I sound out to be another loan word and try to decipher it as an English word, which isn't very helpful.

On a side note I did find the Pohang T-r-u-m-p-e-t-En-s-e-m-b-l-e.

Bonus picture:

Last year I wrote about one class where the song was titled: "We Don't Take Our Shoes Off In the House".

I was a bit irritated by this lesson, because really people in the West do take their shoes off in the house. And this was just so wrong. And another example of stereotyping of foreigners in the text book. And yadda f'n yadda yadda.

Then I went back to the states and was told repeatedly to put my shoes on while in the house, and I realized the text book was right.

We don't take our shoes off in the house. At least not like Koreans take their shoes off in the house.

I was thinking about this today as I was crawling across the floor, careful to keep my weight on my knees because I didn't want my shoes to touch the floor and have the magic Korean Shoes-In-The-House Killer Laser Beams zap me for the simple dumb reason that I forgot to turn off the hot water heater and only remembered after I had put my shoes on and was about to walk out the front door.

I watched the documentary Into Eternity recently. It's about the construction of a nuclear waste storage facility in Finland. The movie brings up the debate regarding whether to mark these locations to warn future generations living thousands of years from now, or not and let nature reclaim the sites while hoping everyone forgets and doesn't dig near them.

Some of the proposed markers look like they've come straight from H.P. Lovecraft.