Archives: Tweets

@tweetsbymoi @pintsizehorror @JustinHowe Yeah, for me it’s mostly the supporting cast who were interesting. Sabrina’s teen woes are less interesting than the community’s dilemmas and politics. (Though I like the whole “psycho royal politics” thread that did involve Sabrina in hell.)

@JustinHowe To some degree that’s not so far from how some of the paying work cunning folk (i.e. “white magic practitioners”) did back in the day… 🙂

@GeekinKorea Right, I maybe wouldn’t have noticed since I make stupidly poor sleep decisions all the time. (And have been busy and worn out anyway.)

@tweetsbymoi @pintsizehorror @JustinHowe Yeah, it freaked me out at the time. (And I was eleven when I saw it, so…)

@GeekinKorea Wow, that’s interesting. I wasn’t told anything beyond the usual (not to shower till the next morning).

@GeekinKorea Yeah, supplies were still available here, but maybe because people were scared off by all the news? Mine was weeks ago (had an appt anyway), but my wife and son got theirs last week.

@pintsizehorror @tweetsbymoi Ha, pretty sure @JustinHowe turned me on to The Love Witch.

I’d add M.R. James’ “The Ash Tree” (in this: gutenberg.org/ebooks/8486) and the color 80s Twilight Zone episode “Gramma” (youtube.com/watch?v=BlyAD-…)—and I’d second Conjure Wife, which I love.

@GeekinKorea Yeah, they always ask about allergies, and advise not to shower. Didn’t know about the “no exercise” though! (Not that I get enough of that these days, so…)

@GeekinKorea Yikes, I didn’t know about the lingering concerns.

You got a free one? I thought they were only for kids and older people. (I know I paid for mine; our son got a free one, but he seems to be okay.)

This is so completely unsurprising I don’t really know what to say about it. https://t.co/yn63YYFGP3 Oh, and IIRC this was reported in the past—it’s the “confirmation” that is news?

@GeekinKorea Yeah, I just heard about this. He’s not the only one, either, though most of the others who have died were elderly. And this is after they had a big inquiry about why some shipments weren’t properly refrigerated, isn’t it? (That was real, right?) @GeekinKorea That said, I was told it’s still being looked into and anaphylactic reactions were suspected? If it was subcontractor mishandling, well… it speaks more poorly to the fact a different supplier is used for subsidized shots than for the pay-for-a-shot supplier.

@jeremiahtolbert @count_01 Now you have my vote.*

(*With the caveat that it has to be proper jazz, not that not-scary-easy-listening-white-people-in-tuxes-in-Burbank, California-West-Coast-studio-big-band shit.)

@GeekinKorea Anyway, it became tolerable as it warmed up, and I would not have traded it for a glass of Korean pilsner, for sure!

But then I’m one of those weirdoes whose best beer experiences tend to involve sour/funky Belgian-type beers, or enough smoke flavor to call to mind a campfire!

@GeekinKorea Funnily enough, this wasn’t “bad” enough to make me long for a Korean pilsner. Lots of new world hop varieties actually can give an onion off flavor, and I think what I was tasting as chicken cold cuts when it was cold warmed up into was maybe a garlic/onion hop tone. @GeekinKorea Which is to say, I think it maybe wasn’t autolysis after all, and… well, I’ve had oniony/garlic hop flavors in beers I made myself, too. It can depend on the crop, apparently. (One of my favorite hops, Citra, is pretty unreliable and does this sometimes.)

Not gonna name the beer from yesterday, because bad batches happen, but…

TFW when the off-flavor of your IPA morphs from “luncheon meat?” (autolysis?) to “half-caramelized onions?” (photolysed hop acids?) to “eh, this is okay I guess…” (ah, life in the countryside).

@tweetsbymoi @pintsizehorror So… wormwood rice cake? Wow.

@jeremiahtolbert youtube.com/watch?v=nS5_EQ…

@bananders @yacobg42 They don’t? I’d have assumed audiophiles don’t like radio because of the quality difference from, you know, just playing a DVD.

@bananders @yacobg42 I mean, before a certain year (I dunno which), the answer would be: *all* albums? But so much incredible music.

@isasv (I don’t enjoy giving Fs most of the time, but when someone is so insultingly transparent in their lie… yeah, I feel a certain sense of justice in that F. Were I in a place where departments usually care about such things, I’d have reported it to his major department too.)

@isasv One of my favorite “I had a conflict” was this: a guy claimed he was at a funeral of his high school teacher’s. Sent me this screencap of his high school’s webpage, with a death announcement photoshopped onto it: even if you can’t read Korean text, it’s obviously faked. @isasv I looked up the actual school’s website—easy web search—and found the main web page he’d screencapped. I bookmarked it on my work computer and told him he should come meet me in my office the next day if he wanted to discuss the issue. He never replied or showed up, sadly.

@isasv Yeah, most expats who move back to Canada comment on long wait times for booking things compared to in Korea. It’s one of those things Canadians are used to but people from anywhere else find baffling. (More for repairs, from what I’ve heard. No idea about dentists.) @isasv (Also, dental is (largely) covered—in part, at least—by your nationalized health insurance here, which… it baffles me it wouldn’t be in other places, now. IIRC, not *everything* is covered, but a lot of basic/necessary stuff is.)

@isasv Wait, what? Yeah, no. You can have quality time with your dog at other times than scheduled class time. That’s… bizarre.

@isasv @GeekinKorea Not quite that bad yet, but I am sensitive to it. Then again it’s our first winter and home office is against the outside wall of the building, so… I suspect that’s it.

@WhoAteTheSquid Well, there is a “raining like hell when will this stop” season, at least some years!

Creepy, beautiful heartbreaker of a story from @maureenmcq—for those of you, like me, who were living under a rock earlier this year and missed it:

tor.com/2020/07/22/yel…

@ajosshi @GeekinKorea I mean, define cool. (Shut-in with a young child and a headache and a bunch of books piled all around him is the gold standard, right?)

@ajosshi @GeekinKorea Me too. But…

@ajosshi @GeekinKorea It happens to the best of us. Well, provided we survive long enough! @ajosshi @GeekinKorea But @JustinHowe is right, it’s also about how isolated you are.

(And I always nodded politely at people back home. I remember Korean friends finding it awkward, like I was “bowing” and being “too formal” and I was baffled. “But I did this in Canada…”)

@GeekinKorea @ajosshi I mean, I feel like it’s more about how long one has been here, or something? I feel like expats progress from eager friendly nods through less enthusiastic nods to averting their eyes from the excitedly nodding newbie foreigner as the years pass…

@GeekinKorea Yup, same switch in the car. Though for me, I wish it was just a little warmer—the perfect weather for me was about two weeks ago. I feel the cold in my bones. Didn’t used to, so maybe it’s just age. I know I risk my Real Canadian membership card by saying this, but it’s true.

It is now actually cold enough I cannot leave the window open for more than about 10 minutes before I get uncomfortable and close it. In the daytime. A month ago it was the same, but because it was too warm/humid.

@yacobg42 You might be surprised how many musicians are like this too! Picky audiophile ≠ well-trained ears (for musical content).

Also, many musicians grew up listening to/learning from scratchy LP/audiocassettes/128bitMP3s containing incredible. @yacobg42 Note, ≠ means “not necessarily” rather than “never.”

(Also, high-end audio systems are $$$. And thus out of reach for lots of working musicians…)

@isasv I’ll also say, for anyone eagerly misreading me: this isn’t all my students. It’s just some of them. The proportion who act like this varies by campus and, honestly, by major. At some places such nonsense was almost unheard of; at others, it’s more common.

@ELChandler5 Small. Started with taking writing assignments in 5th grade seriously, turned to poems and Ghostbusters fanfic. Dad took me to the local writing club’s weekly meeting at the library (all grownups and one high school boy). I’ll always be grateful for the time he spent doing that.

Just in case you thought Les Miserables was unrealistic.

(This is plain horrifying.) https://t.co/exuTXiGtLc And yes, I know, it’s because of his priors, but: a year in prison for stealing a carton of eggs is still absurd.

(Doesn’t this just incentivize bigger crimes, since, if you’re gonna get jail time even for eggs, you may as well make it worth your while?)

@isasv (I mean, I don’t know, but I’ve heard it’s really hard to schedule things conveniently at a lot of businesses in Canada, compared to here? And AFAIACT a dog is a family member.)

My students get one “free” absence per semester anyway, because life happens. @isasv (And, not to go TMI, but I multiply participation x attendance to get the overall part/att grade. The occasional absence isn’t as big a deal if someone participates well; perfect attendance means much less unless one does participate actively. But’s that’s unusual for here.)

@isasv Ha, oh, that’s universal: I got that in Montreal too!

But I never had students who said, “I got a full time job, so I cannot attend class and have no time to do the work. Can I just have a C+ for free?” (Nor do I expect any .ca uni implcitly allowing that becoming common.) @isasv That said, I’d sympathize with “putting my dog down.” More often I just get, “I drank so much, so I could not wake up,” or “I was busy with my major department class assignment.”

“Cool, if that’s your priorities. Just don’t complain when your attendance grade suffers, okay?”

@isasv But I’ll also note that I ran a department-wide survey. Most students preferred online classes, and most of the factors they cited were implicitly tied to the classes being prerecorded. *shrug*

@isasv Teleconferencing apps are not particularly useful for lecture-based instruction, is my point. I much prefer Zoom for my Presentation course, but for writing classes? Prerecorded was way better. Even a hybrid of prerecorded + live is better. @isasv (In fact, I’ve found a technical workaround that allows me to give them prerecorded grammar bites and structure bites/exercises for homework, while doing writing/discussion exercises in the mandatory “live classes.”)

@isasv Right, I mean, at a grad school level, when people are discussing, it’s natural that prerecorded classes don’t work. More typical in my case is this: @isasv In some classes, I still (seven weeks into semester, and after explicitly coaching them to talk to one another) encounter subgroups of classes who, when they’re in a breakout room, sit with their mics turned off, staring at one another onscreen in silence until I appear.

(Not not *that* curious. I personally have no interest in Kpop. I only heard about this because my students mentioned the collaboration, and I googled it so I would be able to talk about it with them. First thing that came up with mob abuse on Twitter… unsurprisingly.) I think the lesson is that we should not lump all Kpop fans together when some are toxic, but… well, we also shouldn’t lump them all together when praising the outstanding support some of them offered to BLM and their criticisms/attack on paramilitary police violence in the US.

I liked that a lot of Kpop fans supported BLM, and it earned some grudging respect from me. But… well… it was only a matter of time before the crazier elements in Kpop fandom reared their heads and:

https://t.co/0yFzJYYTx0 (There’s also apparently been death threats and homophobic harassment of people who’ve commented in support of her response, though most of that is reported in crappy tabloid newspapers, so… *shrug*)

I am curious why so many Blackpink fans objected to the collaboration.

RT @LotFP: New Review!

tenfootpole.org/ironspike/?p=6…

@GeekinKorea Anyway, no, I don’t think you’re out of line. If the absence is legit, they can get a doc. If it’s not, a single absence in the semester is not life or death. (I actually tell my students they get a free absence because obviously sometimes you just can’t make it to class.)

@GeekinKorea Also, it’s absurdly easy for a class of 3 students to no-show. I had a 9am Writing class that did it a few times: it was 3 guys who partied and slept in a lot. My policy is simply, “If half the class doesn’t arrive within 30 min, class is canceled, no make-up.” @GeekinKorea (Though actually, in practice, the one time that one guy showed up alone, 20 min late, we stayed for an hour, going over homework and discussing some issue in the textbook, before calling it a day.)

@GeekinKorea Oh, official documents. Yeah, my whole thing with those is, “Yeah, get me one whenever.” Those who bother get the excused absence. Those who don’t, don’t. Simple. They can get a document, I’m sure. @GeekinKorea I mean, students can get documents for department soccer games and dance contests. Can’t be that hard. *shrug*

@GeekinKorea In these kinds of idiotic situations, I declare attendance “optional” (i.e. everyone on the class list who attends normally is counted as present). If admins cannot plan more than a day ahead, it’s not my problem, it’s theirs—and they should sort it out. @GeekinKorea (But if students knew more than a few hours earlier—say, a day or two—and didn’t bother to notify me? Well, technically it’s on them, and they know this if they were listening on Day 1… and 2… and 3.)