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Peter Solarz
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
đȘŒ

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DEAR READER
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pixel skylines
taylor price

oozey mess
Jules of Nature
KIROKAZE

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Misplaced Lens Cap

if i look back, i am lost

tannertan36
d e v o n
wallacepolsom
YOU ARE THE REASON

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@timocraticyouth
The makers of Tic Tacs had a problem on their hands.
After 18 months of internal study, they had concluded that the all-important millennial generation might not be content with a mere mint.
No, the millennials wanted entertainment, release from boredom, âemotional rescue.â
Oh, to Be Young, Millennial, and So Wanted by Marketers - NYTimes.com
âLast month, Whole Foods revealed that it would open a line of grocery stores âgeared to millennial shoppers,â with a âcurated selection,â âstreamlined designââ -- sweet!! Whole Foods just invented Trader Joeâs!!
I mean, weâre now dating, but itâs a better story if I cut it off there, right?
relationship status
But so I note I didnât even mention the four-ish months (-ish because I went back to the UK for four weeks of it, and her to the US for two) spent sort-of dating S., textile artist, talented and funny and cute and probably deserving of better than she got from me, who after the night I claimed I was unable to sleep because sheâd put a non-matching pillow-case on one of the pillows on my bed said, âI think we should take a break,â more or less, and with whom I later split up via KakaoTalk.
After she heard about this my best friend â who I was challenged, once, as I recall it, to give some account of to what degree I was moving to Korea because I was pathetically in love with her, to which I responded, not more than 20% at the most â then started acting really fucking weird and squirrelly, before calling me sometime around one a.m. when I was drunk to lead up to, if, hypothetically speaking, I were to ask you out, what would you say?âto which I responded, in a sort of urgent drunk cogency, I would say that would be a terrible idea for reasons a., b., c., d.i and d.ii., and e. And after terminating this phone call I went and smoked my first cigarette of the year and thought, wait, why did I think that was a good idea.
camel flu pt. 2
Anyway, thanks to all this our branch had what is called an Empathy Meeting during normal office hours, rather than in the usual 11pm-2am slot. An Empathy Meeting is where the CEO visits a branch to lead a sort of ⊠letâs call it a seminar ⊠on career development. It starts with us lining up in the entrance corridor five-to-ten minutes before he arrives to be ready to chant his name. We file into the main room where he greets us and lectures, about two-thirds in Korean, before making us read a fairly banal article written by someone from Harvard Business School about how we should evaluate our best selves to realise what opportunities we should follow. The thrust of the article is not really about staying with your employer, letâs say.
This is also an occasion for the CEO to prove he speaks better English than the native speakers by asking them to provide an account of the differences in meaning between two near-synonyms or  not-even-synonyms, before cutting them off after 20-30 seconds of hesitant explanation to supply his own explanation, in Korean, with a minute plus, including etymology. I got asked to do knowledge and awareness and I promise I wasnât actually trying to win by not playing when I went into highbrow mode: âOh, knowledge can equally refer to something in your own self and a personal propertyâI mean, a library is a repository of knowledge, right?--but âawarenessâ requires filtration through a sensibility of some sortââ Â
CEO looked at me quizzically for a second or two and then went straight to Korean (something something saram something) and Iâm pretty sure what he said translated as this person sure knows a lot of words.
big locust
A little while before MERS Week we had a conference thing, which happened in the morning, in Seoul, before going and working our regular 3pm-10pm in the town I live, work in, outside Seoul. After an opening in which a Korean jazz band played selections from the soundtrack of WhiplashâI refuse to see that movie, so I canât comment on how accurate they were, or whether the drummer totally losing the beat during his solo was a deliberate thing, or whether they were allowed to play their own solos (1), even, mainly I was just thinking, âwhy is this arrangement of âCaravanâ so fucking horribleââwe were informed, âwe will now being the 22nd (COMPANY_NAME) foundation day with an enthusiastic ovation.â This was perhaps not as good as the CEOâs introduction: âHe is the CEO of (COMPANY_NAME,) but prefers humbly to be called âteacherâ and âmentorâ.â Â
Before the CEO came out weâd had an hour of people being given banquets for their promotion. We were informed that everyone at this company had worked harder than everyone at every other; however, some who had worked especially hard were to be honoured that day. There was more chanting. One of the Korean teachers from my branch sung âReflectionsâ, from Mulan (2), and then a risquĂ© 80s hi-NRG pop number with which I was not familiar while two more people whom I was going to have to look in the eye that day danced to accompany her in a PG-rated âsexyâ fashion and in black dresses, artificial feather boas. The MCs performed a folky version of the company song, and then we were shown a music video of a rap version. A couple weeks later I asked the American-born HR who hired me what he thought of this stuffâwhether it was normalâhe said, itâs not normal for a hagwon but itâs normal if youâre Samsung. Which is the point.
Incidentally, two or three people have asked me if I am working for Samsung, this being the intersection of three things: i. the town I live, work in is a big base for them; ii., I have a big, deceptively flashy-looking cheap phone of a kind not sold here; iii., I am better dressed than most English teachers.
(1)Â Â Â Last month our team leader, meditating on what to make his students do, hatched the idea of making them write Aesopâs Fables: announced this as a moment of inspiration. There was a brief silence in the small office the native-speaker staff share, and then I said, âThe fox thought he was so clever, thinking for himself, but then the bees, who understood their place, stung him to death.â
(2)Â Â Â I get a kind of grisly satisfaction whenever I encounter something which feels like a bad joke someone would make about Asia. This event probably trumped the previous high point, when I noticed that Korean Air divided its passenger classes into Economy, Business, and Morning Calm.
camel flu
I woke up the other day and things were unusually quiet; I walked through the deserted corridors of my apartment building and wondered what it would be like to be the last man on Earth: it would suck if I were in Korea, I decided; thereâs no English language libraries, so Iâd never work out how to grow crops before all the food in the stores went off. Â
Hereâs a video my coworkers made last week (EDIT: thereâs a video my coworkers made on youbtube but I thought it was a bad idea to put it here!! In it they tell you how to wash your hands!!). I ducked out of being in it because Iâm a terrible person and I could tell it was going to be a terrible, terrible time-sink. This was in the week we had off work due to the MERS scare, which as far as I can tell is a matter of a handful of basically contained cases being accentuated by a confused government response. Â At least Iâm hoping thatâs the case, because if it is actually about to spiral into a pandemic I look forward to being quarantined in a non-English speaking environment. Do you, as one of my students would write, Do you know MERS? MERS is a coronavirus thingummy, may or may not be the new SARS, no vaccine, centred in the Middle East.
Apparently one of the ministers responsible made a statement saying everyone was perfectly safe the same week another minister said that, due to the first ministerâs failure to take effective action, the disease was going to spiral out of control and everyone was going to die.
As far as I can tell apart from their total failure to release accurate information to the public in a timely and responsible manner the government didnât do a terrible job, particularly. Though the only article anyone shared that explained that in depth was in Korean, so I have no idea. The index patient went to multiple doctors and hospitals before telling any of them heâd just come back from the Middle East, which, well, seems like thatâd do it.
I had to go to a hospital which was rumoured affectedâthough not on the list the government eventually releasedâto collect the second test my employer has required slash Korea has required to confirm I neither take drugs nor have AIDS. I was met at the front by employees in surgical gowns and masks who took my temperature and made me disinfect my hands before they let me in. I had weird flashbacks to the time I spent in Flu Camp two years ago, with nurses in similar coming around to do grotesque nasal washes and shove painful things in my nostrils.
i am so ready for revived ff7 fandom
pratchett, part one
timocraticyouth:
I was going to reread them all in order, and write about them one-by-one on here, but I prevented from doing so by circumstances (even in Seoul thereâs a lack of really good English-language bookshops)âbut given the lack of a coherent design is, I guess I just claimed, one of the seriesâ strengths, maybe thatâs for the best: also, I have plenty of other projects to not finishâ
Okay letâs do this:
The Colour of Magic is not a very good novel: it seems to keep asserting that whatâs going on is funny when all it really is well-observed and it isnât even very well observed. It does âsendupsâ pf various fantasy types, though âsendupsâ is probably conceding too much ground when whatâs actually going on is âhaving Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser show up but, like, with slightly changed names.â The running schtick is that an incompetent wizard (name of Rincewind) is operating as guide-cum-translator for  a tourist (name of Twoflower) anachronistically present in what is basically what Diana Wynne Jones later termed âfantasylandâ. Iâm not sure if this is actually a bad book or if Iâm just overfamiliar with all of itâthe basic schtick having been largely outdone time and time again later in Pratchettâs career. While Iâm making excuses for it, I should note that my entry-point for all this was Interesting Times, in which Twoflowerâs homeland is rendered in some detail: which defangs the joke when you come to it the other way round. The McCaffrey send-up is metaphysically quasi-interesting, I guess. I would give this book a letter grade of C-.
The Light Fantastic is like the first novel but has actual jokes: a run-in with druids who are building a giant stone circle which functions uncannily like an IBM-compatible PC, for example. The jokes arenât any good, as such, but I donât know if thatâs the point. Certain of the improvements suggest Terryâs wife had a quiet word with himâinstead of introducing scantily-clad barbarian women in a post-ironic yuk-yuk-yuk mode here the narrator berates the reader for expecting same. It works, sort of. The first bookâs Conan-analogue is quietly required for the septuagenarian Cohen the Barbarian. I have this half-developed theory about the role of humour in the novelâbasically, whether itâs actually funny is irrelevantâthat I suspect I have been unconsciously developing these twenty years largely to defend this kind of thing. Like the first book, no plot, as such. C+
Equal Rites is the first of these books to have any point. A wizard leaves his staff to, he thinks, his son; it turns out, his daughter. The daughter, Esme, is apprenticed to a witch, Granny Weatherwax, who takes her to Unseen University, the school-for-wizards introduced in passing in books one, two, to maintain that she ought to be permitted an education. Unseen University, a sort of second-hand Oxbridge-in-the-50s send-up, will remain in the background of the series all through, eventually becoming the focus of one of the post-Alzheimerâs novels. Annoyingly, Pratchett introduces a B-plot about a teenage wizarding prodigy who provides a quantum mechanics analogue to the Newtonian physics of Discworld wizarding, thus unleashing his vaguely Lovecraftian âcreatures from the Dungeon Dimensionsâ: annoyingly, because one suspects he didnât want to follow through on the implications of the other plot, which is just getting goingâwith Esme disguised as a serving girl learning the ways of the Universityâwhen the novel detours into the will-the-world-end-no-it-wonât stuff. Weatherwax will be one of the seriesâ central figures; Esme, meanwhile, Pratchett will implicitly admit he has no ideas for, vanishing until she turns up again in a book written almost twenty-five years later. Â B-
In Mort the self-aware grim reaper of the discworld hires an apprentice, who fucks up by trying to save one of the lives heâs meant to be collecting, creating a flaw in the very fabric of reality. That the narrator quietly informs you that the flaw is going to fix itself is an interesting guide to methodâthat the stakes are actually pretty low is more interesting, maybe, than to insist they are high. I donât know; Iâm in two minds, even having just reread this, quite how well it actually works. Herein the whole Discworld setup is basically irrelevant to the central fantastic plot, though Death (who is in all-but-one of the books, I think?) is fairly embedded in the canon or whateverâanyway, perhaps that the motivating force of this isnât just pastiche or parody is why Pratchett ends up writing the first of these Iâm comfortable calling an actually good novel. B+
pomes ect
I donât know how likely it is that Iâll be posting right here in the short-to-medium-term future, but there is a bunch of stuff queued over at my (shudders) poetry tumblr.
Iâm pretty sure I just read a tumblr bio which states the author gave up on their academic career to focus on their tumblr: which I have to admit offers an appealing way of recontextualising the last few years--
Iâve been rereading Terry Pratchett for a couple of weeks; been meaning to since his death. I suspect who Pratchett was, is more or less known to anyone who might be reading this, but if not: British fantasy novelist, primarily known for a long, long series of sort-of comic fantasy novels set on a sort-of planet called the Discworld, which made him until fairly recently the best-selling British f.n. since Tolkien and Lewis. Diagnosed with Alzheimerâs eight years ago; wrote and made documentaries about the ethics of euthanasia; last month, tweets appeared on his account in which the personification of Death from his novels greeted him (âWE MEET AT LAST, SIR TERRYâ) roughly contemporaneously with his publishers announcing he had died peacefully at home etc., a statement they followed with another announcing and it totally wasnât suicide, I donât know why you would think otherwise, leave us alone.
The metaphysics of Pratchettâs books: on the Discworld, anything believed in strongly enough tends to exist. Death, cowled and scythed and c., is aware that he is an anthropomorphic personification of a natural force, faintly melancholic about it, rather lonely, with a fondness for cats.
That Pratchett (or his assistant) had his creation address him as âSir Terryâ is fairly revealing, in ways I donât want to limn too obtusely. His comment on his OBE for âservices to literatureâ was âI suspect they consisted of refraining from trying to write any.â â On the internet you can watch a video of him debating the value of fantasy with Terry Eagleton and A.S. Byatt, not that youâd want to. â You can also find him defending himself against J.K. Rowling fans on alt.fan.harry-potter, circa 2005.
The Discworld books start as a silly romp through fantasy topoi; the first paperback of The Colour of Magic, the first novel, calls it Jerome K. Jerome doing Lord of the Rings, right there on the front cover, though the immediate antecedents are in Leiber and Howard way more than in Inkling stuff. Joke: a septuagenarian sword-and-sorcery hero called Cohen the Barbarian. Joke: a Japanese tourist wandering around whatâs basically Lankhmar. Your patience for this will forever depend on the kind of person you were at thirteen. A word which is used a lot is âparodyâ, which I guess the books are doing in the way that, say, Diana Wynne-Jones is doing in A Tough Guide to Fantasyland, which we can credibly say is parodying both those same fantasy topoi and the Rough Guide series. Iâm less assured of the claim that Wyrd Sisters, which imports chunks of Hamlet and Macbeth, is parodying Shakespeare, or that The Last Continent, probably the nadir of the series, is parodying Australia. Iâm not sure where Iâm going with this. I guess that parody requires assumptions about shared context and distance that donât really work when looked at from certain angles.
The usual highbrow argument for his defence, which isnât entirely wrong, is that in the long-term effort of writing tens of thousands of words set in this world (which, altogether now, rides on four elephants, which ride on the back of a turtle ⊠) Pratchett develops something like moral depth and seriousness of purpose.
The lowbrow argument for his defence is that heâs just funny and you donât need an argument for his defence. (Obviously I donât care for this argument.)
Thereâs a line in Equal Rites â something along the order of âfog swirled around the rooftops as the wizard strode across the bridge, although the two did not have anything to do with one anotherâ â which is something like Beckett in Watt, which I wasnât expecting. There have been few more like that, though there was a not very good Beckett joke in Wyrd Sisters.
The claim Iâd want to develop is that Pratchettâwhile himself vocal about the genreâs possibilitiesâwas perfectly positioned, in the 80s, for his very silliness to expand into a critique of its limitations. That his awareness of this was probably the motor, on some level, for him to keep writing the things. Itâs an agon thatâs hard to precisely describeâDiscworld cuts across a buncha fantasy tendencies of the last three decades, sometimes looking a bit like a cottage-industry version of TSRite shared-world licenses, sometimes thumbing its nose at the grimânâgritty, and pre-empting or running in parallel with Mievilleish revaluations of how urban space works in the fantastic. And sometimes, yes, it throws all that up to make jokes about wizards and boomerangs: I suppose part of the claim Iâm making is that this is also a strength, but Iâm not very invested in this part of the claim.
The book after the wizards-and-boomerangs book reconceives Cohen the Barbarian in a dumb gag which is also Beckettian, if you look at it sideways for long enough: heâs on a quest âto return fire to the Gods.â
--
I was going to reread them all in order, and write about them one-by-one on here, but I prevented from doing so by circumstances (even in Seoul thereâs a lack of really good English-language bookshops)âbut given the lack of a coherent design is, I guess I just claimed, one of the seriesâ strengths, maybe thatâs for the best: also, I have plenty of other projects to not finish--
So mostly Iâve been reading the Tiffany Aching books, which I hadnât read before, and the earlier books about witches, which I had, but I feel like I didnât read them with sufficient attention or justice when I was fourteen, because I thought the ones about Rincewind were funnier. Â The Tiffany Aching books seem at least a little motivated by the desire to earn some of that adolescent wizarding megabucks but, hey, if you've read Interesting Times, say, you'll think, well, at least being motivated by something is a benefit ...
[Transcripts in captions]
this is probably my favourite thing of its type since the first few printedinternets
if anyoneâs interested: the study my professor did was basically with children who were 2-3 years old. they laid out toys for them to play with that were commonly associated with one gender or the other (action figures vs. dolls, a pink and therefore âgirlyâ bike vs. a non-pink and âmasculineâ bike or w/e). for a while they would observe them in the room and the children would be aware they were being watched by them. during this period pretty much every child played with the âappropriateâ toys
what they did next was then have everyone leave the room, but be watching behind one-way glass, and observe which toys the children would choose when they didnât think they were being watched. a lot of children would play with any toy, regardless of which gender it was âmeantâ for. they had no problem with it. but they were aware of the fact that adults and other people had a problem with it. they had already learned what they were âsupposedâ to do, despite the fact they didnât seem to honestly care. just as long as they thought they werenât being watched and wouldnât get in trouble for not playing with the ârightâ toys⊠which in itself says something
basically it supported the idea that children internalize gender roles at a young age, are aware of them, and it isnât innately something a certain gender prefers over the other (or someone with one type of genitals innately prefers, as most people correlate gender with genitals, especially regarding a child. so it seems logical to assume itâs unrelated)
theyâre just kind of arbitrary associations that seem to do more harm than good
file under well duh; also file under deeply depressing
surrealist movement was full of fuckboys