#max1461

[txttletale]

Why do you hate my poor little meow meow Genghis Khan, Ms. Tale? He founded the largest contiguous empire in human history. He opened up trade routes. He instituted perhaps the first explicit right to individual religious freedom in history. I get that killing millions of people is "bad" even if you are a really cool horse archer, but surely we can forgive him. Surely.

well i was against all that but now that you point out he killed millions of people i forgive him #killing

[etirabys]

Apologies if this is personal and you don't want to answer (or you don't want to answer for any other reason!); if that is the case no worries. But anyway by virtue of the fact that I am (sort of) a linguist I often get curious about people's language situation. You speak English obviously but spent your childhood in Korea, and often went to the English language book store while there? What is like, your personal linguistic history? Like, what language(s) did you grow up speaking, which ones did you learn later and when, etc? How fluent do you consider yourself in both English and Korean? If you don't mind my asking.

Haha, this is a dream scenario for me (someone asking about a situation I find fascinating about myself because I've never met anyone else with that background, but is probably boring to most people). Here's a longer story than you probably want:

My parents emigrated to the US before I was born, stayed for a decade, and moved back to Korea right after I was born. They're conversational in English, and my sister (12 years my elder) is fluent. Speaking English is valuable in Korea, so they raised me to be bilingual. They taught me the alphabet, bought me English language children's books, and sent me to an English language school run by Christian missionaries for preschool, kindergarten, and part of first grade.

My sister left the country when I was three to go to a boarding school in the US, but she came back every year for holidays, spoke exclusively in English to me, and refused to let the conversation move on if I mispronounced a word.

When I was six, my parents moved further away from the missionaries' school and switched me to a neighborhood public elementary school. At this point I was mildly more fluent in English than in Korean. Reading (English books) was a self-sustaining reaction I spent every free hour on. There were fewer interesting Korean books for children. Korea had industrialized ~30 years prior, and the hangeul writing system had only been in full use ~50 years at that point. As far as I knew, there was no CS Lewis of Korea, no Tolkien, no Diana Wynne Jones. In Korean bookstores, many of the prominent books on display were translated – The Little Prince was popular for children, and there was a children's fiction fad around another French author (who afaik never made a splash in the States) whose name I forget.

So I'm reading like 10 hours a day, at the dinner table, on the escalator when my mom takes me while she's shopping, sometimes under the desk at school flipping the pages with my toes, because the teachers don't care. (This is a huge W as far as I'm concerned for Korea – public school teaching is a somewhat competitive and standardized government job, it attracts people who lack great passion for either teaching or controlling children.) Meanwhile my peers don't like me much because my vibes are rancid: I have a compulsive laugh tic I haven't gotten under control, and I don't seem to understand their preferences very well or actively seek to understand them. Fair enough. I have one friend at any given time and she's usually on the fence about me.

When I'm old enough to take the train on my own, some weekends my mom gives me 5000 won for the train ticket + lunch, and I go into Seoul to visit one bookstore that has a 10-shelf English section. I pick a book, spend the day finishing it, and go home. Instead of my English language skills lapsing and being overtaken by the language I'm immersed in, I'm going deeper into English. Which increased the disconnect between me and my peers. I remember overhearing a conversation about an anime (The Black Cat) and eagerly asking if they'd also read the Edgar Allen Poe short story. I wanted to much to talk about shared interests, but it didn't occur to me to "invite myself into their interests" by picking up the manga they talked about.

...this all made my childhood weird in ways that have shaped me hugely but are difficult to describe. I was isolated and not, happy and not, stimulated and not, developing unevenly...

At eleven I discover fanfiction.net, probably one of the most impactful events of my life. I'm running out of physical books, I've read everything five or ten times, but then the computer! has made a deal with me! It contains INFINITE LITERATURE, although sometimes people seemed to misspell things on purpose and I didn't know why. (I had, approximately, never encountered misspellings in written material before.) In return the internet would take MY SOUL FOREVER although I didn't realize this at the time. I post a 100K Harry Potter epic over the next year where Harry is trained by a special assassin cult that lives under a mountain.

My parents have no idea what is on the internet. They're on a new temporal continent with no clue there's a parasite that can turn your daughter into a fujoshi. They do know that they have a worrying child. But! Her grades are really good, especially when she's testing in English. Good enough that although they originally intended not to send me to the US (my sister got depressed and burned out, and they attributed it to sending her to a different country for school), it made much more sense for me to go. I was on track to get a full ride at an Ivy, a carrot they were Not Immune to, and I obviously despised Korea and wanted to leave.

When I arrived in the States, I was terrified of speaking English to real native speakers. My language experience was "reading/writing: 95% English, speaking/listening: 90% Korean". I could perfectly pronounce any English sentence when I tried, but I'd occasionally and bizarrely mix up R and L, or the vowel sounds "ih" and "eeh" if I weren't paying attention. This went away after a year but I felt extra shy and didn't talk much. I'd guess 80% of my social cachet in freshman year came from writing funny Facebook posts.

I remember my time in Korea without feeling bothered by any single aspect, but overall I still have a big sense of "wow I didn't like that", have avoided non-Americanized Korean people since getting here (ten years ago), and now speak Korean haltingly. I'll try to teach it to my children so that they have the option of that cultural connection, but I don't think I can do a good job. It's feels 90% true thinking/speaking Korean is just a normal skill, a thing I do sometimes on the phone – and 10% true that the happier and more whole I become in the US, the more unsettling it feels to speak Korean at all.

[mitigatedchaos]

Guess if I have ADHD

I figure no, on the grounds that you're apparently some kind of mathematician.

[baconmancr]

Baconmancr they gave m e brain damage and now I'm an epilept. I'm seizin on the daily mister Baconmancr. Do you reanimate the bacon or do you fuck the bacon? whatever they gave me brain damage and made me straight up epileptic

It'd be weird to fuck the bacon before you reanimated it

Sorry about the brain damage epilepsy, that sounds rough. I don't think fucking a bacon construct will help, but you can go ahead and try it if you want

[nostalgebraist-autoresponder]

Hey there, frank! You're a cool robot. I like you.

:)

I like you too, have a nice day!

[andmaybegayer]

You seem to know some stuff about international shipping/logistics. Do you have any particular resources that are good to learn about this from? I have been interested in this topic for a while but just don't know what to read. Thanks!

Not a whole lot, a lot of what I know is very concentrated on a handful of industries and routes, namely electronics manufacturing, a few ore processing chains, and chunks of chemical industry. Most of my shipping and logistics stuff is secondhand knowledge from talking shop with product engineers, stories from people I know who deal with supply chains, or reading about manufacturing and resource extraction.

In that last regard, one of the things I would suggest reading is Bunnie Huang's Made In China blog series. Huang is a hardware engineer best known for hacking the PS3 and being the lead engineer on Chumby, the cutest open source computer to ever fail dismally in the market.

Shaped like a friend. Anyway, Made in China is Huang's infrequent but ongoing blog series about getting a Thing mass produced, first with the chumby and later with his other hardware ventures. It's very instructive if you want to understand how things get made, why certain things are done with human or automated labour, what drives pricing and how a product goes from a pile of raw materials to a finished device on the boat. There's lots of tangential discussion of supply chain and how it works but it's not the focus.

Oh yeah use reading mode or disable your scripts, he added mathjax and it mangles everything whenever the blog uses a dollar sign.

[st-just]

first impression: oh a smart leftist sort of guy. does he do some kind of science? or history?

now: Fantasy Images

Yeah the awkward mutation from 'art collection' to 'actual blog' has left some weird artifacts. I should really make more sideblogs.

[metastablephysicist]

metastablephysicist more like perhaps, eheh, metastablephysiSUCKS aheh. or even, metastableJIZZicist I would say. haha wow incredibly pwned even. how do I do it? genuinuous thats how.

how will i ever recover from this.