Archives: Tweets

@ToddWilde1 @PatrickJQuinn2 @BBCLBicker Most people I know in places with failed-state approaches to COVID (i.e. the West) are actually living in *much more* fear than anyone I know in Korea. (To be fair, my friends aren’t dumb enough to believe “It won’t happen to me.” They’re watching loved ones sicken and die.)

@BBCLBicker I mean, you’re *so* close.

(COVID is not widespread, *because* life is far from normal 2 years on from the start of the pandemic.)

@fosterempathy Yeah, exactly. I think it’s slowly changing: my chair did speak about it, and lots of *students* approached me for help, which says something. (It also says something that my Korean colleagues were shocked by the frequency.) But it was pretty discouraging.

@fosterempathy … especially because it cost nobody anything to leave them there. It wasn’t hurting or insulting anyone, wasn’t creating problems, wasn’t shaming. It was just information that I’d made clear some students always needed, year after year.
But they were trashed anyway.

@fosterempathy —for a week, at my request, in a spot that was out of the way but reachable by students who dropped the office. We tried to get other depts to take them and display them. Most didn’t.
A week later, I dropped by the office. They were gone. “Where?”
“The trash.”
Sigh. @fosterempathy And I mean, when I worked there I had 2-3 students a semester coming to me with psychological crises, emotional crises, needing to be given the number to the “good” counseling office on campus (because there was also a “bad” one).
Seeing those pamphlets trashed broke my heart…

@fosterempathy Students were distraught. Dorms abandoned on weekends. Everyone was on edge. Several students came to me for advice/help as they were now suicidally ideating.
To her credit, my Dept. Chair at the time let me talk her into speaking about it at an upcoming department event— @fosterempathy —to urge students to check in with one another, be supportive, to make sure they knew where they could get help if they needed it, to pick up a copy of the pamphlets I’d made on their way out.
I spent hours trying making those pamphlets. They were displayed in the dept. office—

@fosterempathy Maybe that’s a bit too bleak, but… well, I might feel differently if I could think of more than one case where speaking out and advocating for decency amounted to more than me talking pointlessly into a void and burning myself out for nothing. @fosterempathy The one case I do recall, a student jumped (?) out a dorm window to her death on the campus where I worked. Broad daylight, busy area, dozens saw it. University hushed it up at the request of the parent, supposedly a “respected donor” or something.

@fosterempathy Yeah, I don’t feel I can do much now but draw a line in my classes (and hold the line despite a LOT of edgelords pushing it), cheer on my wife’s efforts at consciousness-raising, and help educate my son to respect girls and women as his equals. *shrug* @fosterempathy For “outsiders,” there’ll always be someone telling you you don’t know, don’t understand, have no idea, and should shut up/go home.
I’ve gotten this from people who were born after I arrived here, so… we can’t really help, not in our lifetimes: nobody cares what we think/say.

@GlobalTom @UrsulaV No kidding. When USians send me checks in Korea, I have to mail them to my bank in Canada. Bank tellers here stare and say, “What’s this?” and consult a policy book for 30 min before telling me, “Okay, but it’ll cost you [the equivalent of] $50 and up to a month to cash it.”

Ah, pointless redundant idiotic paperwork, I was wondering when you’d show up…

(Copy, paste, paste, paste… will not rant about how broken everything is and how the best way to improve classes is better support faculty and their autonomy to teach as they best know how.) (Since nobody will read it anyway.)

@fosterempathy “They” meaning some random, very ill individual, mind you. It only takes one. But nobody’s listened to me. IT can’t happen here.

(Just like it couldn’t happen in Montreal.)

And then, when it did, it was imitated:

https://t.co/wGPvUGsnFP @fosterempathy By the time I got to Concordia, they had an explicit system and guidelines for reporting/handling a student, prof, or staff in apparent mental distress, or potentially dangerous to others or themselves.

But .ca unis learned the hard way. So will .kr unis, I guess. Sigh.

@fosterempathy But I am deeply worried about antifeminist backlash here, though. I honestly think the virulence with which it spreads means it’s only a matter of time before Korea sees incidents like this one:

https://t.co/6FwrMXt3Tj

(It’s unlikely guns will be involved, but…) @fosterempathy I’ve been saying this since about 2011. The universities where I’ve worked in Korea all have lacked any policy or guidelines for when a student exhibits worrying or threatening behavior. I’ve said over and over, “It’s not a question of if, it’s a question of when they act out.”

@fosterempathy Absolutely. I also see it in classrooms, but have to be diplomatic. I actually just avoid the issue as much as possible because this idea is so widespread among undergrad guys, and you cannot address it without bollixing both the class and your prof feedback. @fosterempathy I don’t permit anti-feminist ranting in my class, and I always say, “I don’t think that’s really a realistic description of reality,” but I follow up with redirecting them to discussing shared problems faced by both men and women.

Funny how the idea’s mainstream now in S. Korea that feminists are “causing conflict”…

I see mostly men freaking out and pooping their pants over imagined insults & women responding, “Oh, look, he pooped his pants! I bet I can make him cry!”

(Spoiler: they can!) https://t.co/TkDc3RZjPv And… this could be some kind of satirical mockery of the tendency, but the fact many people can’t tell speaks deafning volumes! Like, a few hundred decibels.

@tweetsbymoi The feed is like 90% retweets and the amount I scrolled through was mostly “Yay, Kpop!” and political stuff, to the point where I still have no idea!

@tweetsbymoi Wow, that’s… wow. @tweetsbymoi (I actually went to look at the guy’s feed because the username looks like the word “mocking” but… I still can’t tell if it’s real or satire. Either way, he’s getting properly roasted.)

Another Doug Ford blockbuster, coming soon: A little late-night criticism, because FFS, Ford Nation, what are you doing?

@jeremiahtolbert @foeaelwood Watch out!
“Does your friend suck you into debates you don’t intend to have? He just might be a Cthulhu cultist!”

(You’ll have to imagine me doing a Jeff Foxworthy voice.)

@jeremiahtolbert Hahaha. I actually would have taken it as sarcasm except you gave @foeaelwood a straight answer. 😉

@jeremiahtolbert We have way more (and way more effective) distractions, I suspect! But also…

We’re just fine? I mean, some of us are. But… I think one needn’t look far to find worshippers of callous, uncaring beings who’ll devour them anyway, happily participating in their own destruction!

RT @Penprince_: It’s my birthday, & I have updates, & giveaways 🌝 – the YBASF anthology, now free for Kindle users at the former @AmazonKDP…

RT @koryodynasty: Man in Korea, 23, sexually assaults female minor, takes pics of naked body, meets after a month knowing she’s pregnant, k…

Even when they *do* speak Korean, he adds in the tweet after.

This wholly unsurprising, and… I’ve been braced for it from the start. Institutionally, Korea cannot conceptualize non-Koreans as anything except problematic “foreigners” who “can’t speak Korean.” https://t.co/vi0XootL6T So far, S. Korea’s gov’t has racialized policies for testing, vaccine passports, and now quarantine. It *always* takes foreign institutional pushback to address it.

They love to insist it’s not racist, because their good intentions (for Koreans) means it can’t be racist.

RT @koryodynasty: Also been told that even if they do speak Korean, it doesn’t matter anyway because they are foreign.

@jeremiahtolbert @foeaelwood It’s definitely one view of what “great GMing” is. (But not the only, or best, one.)

Conspicuously absent from this list are, “checked in with players about how it’s going” and “gave everyone spotlight time” and “improvised a scenario based on players’ wacky decisions,” etc.

@trikeabout Yay, I guess? Tho I guess “superfood” is marketing-speak for for “magical food.” But at least you got plenty of Vitamin C as a kid!

(Never had real blackcurrant, only stuff with blackcurrant flavor, which is too bad because I love it. But it’s not common anywhere I’ve lived.)

@mslongjr @SturdyHelpmeet “Bread is now considered communist”?

Has the RNC finally launched the Great Potato Reset?

Or is it more of an “Let them eat NFTs!” situation?

@SturdyHelpmeet Huh, I remember Dynasty being a thing, but not so much as Falcolncrest. The theme song does not jump out at me as something I’ve ever heard before.

@mslongjr @SturdyHelpmeet I think that theory is likely VERY true. And not incompatible with the power of a big hat.

@jeremiahtolbert Ha, it wasn’t a complaint! Just a very odd coincidence. I think when we want weird, our brains go to meat. That said, in the other game, weird sim-meat grown from alien marrow cells has been an ongoing thread of intrigue, commerce, and politics!

@JustinHowe Oh, the alcohol poisoning!

Okay, so that’s two RPG sessions in a row (different groups, different systems, no overlap) where the characters traveled down a tunnel of meat and encountered an enigmatic sphincter they had to travel through.

Unconscious metaphor for the unknowns of a new year, maybe? 🙂 (One group is approaching the end of an extended Scum and Villainy campaign; the other was a one-shot of Heart: The City Beneath.)

Wow, that was FAST. I left the tab open last night when I went to bed, and found it closed already when I got back to it today. Congrats! twitter.com/Penprince_/sta…

@mslongjr @SturdyHelpmeet To some people, yeah. I assume probably also it was just very highly rated, and it’s not like we were bursting at the seams with Canadian-made programming. @mslongjr @SturdyHelpmeet (Well, and a “deal in Canada” featured into the plot, apparently? IME a significant number of people in a marginal, less-powerful nation often tend to experience being acknowledged or namedropped in a more powerful neighboring nations’ media as weirdly validating.)

@jeremiahtolbert But if I live past fifty I’ll have to be around people soooo much more!

😉

(I’m kidding, lots of reasons to live. And anyway they might just put a tracker thing on me to find out if it’s even an issue—it might not be.)

Oh, I am boosted. Booster was no big deal. Didn’t feel it going in, feel mostly fine now.

What was uncomfortable was that the clinic was incredibly crowded and unventilated. The previous experience (at the main local health center) was much better in terms of that stuff. I did get the theme song to Dallas in my head again afterward, though I don’t *think* that’s a known side effect of the vaccine I got, so…

@jeremiahtolbert I believe you, but… it’s the leaving the house part that makes me hesitate.

If I did that, I’d have to be around people. I already did that today, I’m not ready to think about doing it again until at least February! (Exaggeration, albeit slight.)

@JustinHowe @GeekinKorea Not Laszlo being talked into co-hosting a podcast and talking endlessly on one for months on end while snarking at podcasts and mocking podcasters, only to ultimately learn that he’s the co-host of a popular, trending podcast?

@JustinHowe @GeekinKorea Why, by adjusting your cravat and holding your snifter high as you bemoan, “Oh, they’re all on about the Podcasts these days, now *aren’t* they?!”

(In the voice of Jackie Daytona, naturally.)

@jeremiahtolbert For all I know, maybe I do too… no cpap machine means (almost) never needing to know what you dreamed the night before.

(I’m still nervous about braving a sleep clinic during pandemic, but… I probably should go anyway.)

(Tangent, but yes, I know that the word “superfood” goes back decades. Nobody I knew ever used it prior to our last visit back, though. Lexicons change when you’re far away a long time, and it’s always weird to bang into that change face-first on visits home.)

I keep hearing North Americans saying, over and over, “It’s inevitable, everyone’s going to catch this.”

I do not keep hearing people in Korea saying this. Probably because an effort is still being made at containment here, for which I’m grateful. But this is sort of like…

When you call people back home and it’s night for them and day for you, over years and years? That just feels like a disconnect. You visit and learn new words are common place. (“Superfood?”)

This is like that, but bigger and deeper and… sigh.

By the way, I’ve been busy today but last night’s dream is unusual in that it stuck in my head till now (night). I dreamed that I somehow “accidentally” attended WorldCon someplace in the States, and nobody was wearing a mask and then I wasn’t either and I was horrified. Is that the new “I went to school and learned there was an exam I hadn’t studied for?” or “I realized I was naked in front of the class?” Maybe. But I also think it’s about the incredible disconnect I feel with North Americans about where we are with the pandemic.

@mslongjr @SturdyHelpmeet I mean, Dallas aired in Canada, too, so… 😉

Presumably it was even on a Canadian network (CTV?) since IMDB specifies that “Dallas” was the title in Canada, in both English and French.

(I will spare you the obligatory joke about Albertans taking copious notes…)

@mslongjr Ha, the song came back as I was driving home from my vaccine booster shot…

@mcjulie @paulcarp13 I didn’t know it was either, till I saw that link. 🙂

I found an article from just before where the reporting was essentially, “Actual snakes? In theaters? Come on, that’s crazy, who would do that?” Hahaha.

@SturdyHelpmeet Yikes. That said, it’s still surprising that they were so…honest in the opening credits.

I have to ask… did people watch Dallas in Dallas? And did they like it?

@mcjulie @paulcarp13 When this premiered in Seoul, it was protested (film distribution agreement stuff), and the form the protest took was… well, here:

hollywoodsuite.ca/fatal-attracti…