Archives: Tweets

@iampaulkerry @GeekinKorea @daandydan His ex got the prof’s number from his phone and called her to arrange a meeting. Then they both came to his house and screamed at him. Then the threats and the trashing.
My friend, the head teacher, convinced him to leave town for the weekend and turn off his phone. @iampaulkerry @GeekinKorea @daandydan He figured the crooked cop uncle would want nothing to do with this, if the ex-girlfriend even did go to him, which he figured she wouldn’t. (And he was right.)

But… yeah, I can see an angry ex in a bad breakup sending a foreign guy an unsolicited box of pot as revenge.

@iampaulkerry @GeekinKorea @daandydan (He had a habit of getting into fights with anyone who looked at him and his ex the wrong way. Which many people seemed to constantly do. Ahem.)

So he was absolutely terrified at the time. (And sick with a bad cold, so not really thinking straight.) @iampaulkerry @GeekinKorea @daandydan The reason she was so mad was that he’d become close with an attractive young female faculty member. Everyone apparently noticed them always sitting and having instant coffee together. Everyone was puzzled.

Then he started bragging they were having an affair. She was married.

@iampaulkerry @GeekinKorea @daandydan (She also completely trashed his apartment, setting fire to a pile of stuff in the bathroom and so on. I was visiting town that weekend, and crashing with the teacher he came to for help, so I saw the trashed apartment first hand.) @iampaulkerry @GeekinKorea @daandydan She was threatening to got to the police and charge him with sexual assault if he didn’t pay her something like ten million won and leave Korea immediately, or some insanity like that. He was panicked: her uncle was a crooked cop who’d “made problems go away” before for them.

@iampaulkerry @GeekinKorea @daandydan It was a parcel of pot sent anonymously from some other Korean city. He claimed it was an ex-girlfriend’s revenge move, reportedly, but nobody knew for sure.

This happened maybe a year after I left, so I only heard about it second hand and didn’t know the guy. @iampaulkerry @GeekinKorea @daandydan However, I did know another guy (same workplace) whose jilted ex definitely did a similar thing. She called the office impersonating the mom of “one of his students” and claimed he was teaching the kids all about the specifics of various illegal drugs.

@iampaulkerry @GeekinKorea @daandydan @iampaulkerry @GeekinKorea @daandydan The first place I worked here, the cops showed ambushed a foreign teacher who was called to the office to receive a package that had been delivered in his name. Delivery guy was still there, the staff all watching. He was like, “What’s going on?” signed for it, & cops pounced.

@GeekinKorea @iampaulkerry @daandydan IIRC Immigration *can* test people, but usually they just rely on the regular medical exams done in relation to employment.
Which incidentally can’t have been too stringent: multiple expats I worked with back then technically should have failed such an exam but weren’t flagged. @GeekinKorea @iampaulkerry @daandydan I wonder if anyone has ever claimed they were unwittingly dosed by someone without their permission. (Like, “a friend gave me a pot brownie without telling me, as a prank.”)
I imagine the claim would be seen as dubious, but it’s not really an outlandish scenario in some places.

@SaveVsTPK Thank you! It means a lot to me coming from you! (And yeah, I wasn’t thinking of HOME ALONE but it’s a very apt comparison.)

@ahimsakerp Ah, yeah, true!

@ahimsakerp Yeah, I liked the Pellucidar books I’ve read despite their issues. (I think I only read the first three of them so far, but they were fun, if sometimes kind of head-shakey.)

(I have a big pile of ERB books in those Ace paperback editions, waiting for me to get around to them.)

RT @koryodynasty: A S. Korean public health official who illegally spycamed women’s bodies at a subway 100+ times handed a *suspended* pris…

RT @danielgoyal: It’s been another bizarre week in Covid, with a growing schism between countries making efforts to protect their citizens,…

Good grief, this tweet isn’t even really an exaggeration, either. t.co/Yt79ffb5US

It is a social contract, but I suspect it’s not the one he thinks it is. (“Do what others do in order to avoid standing out,” can go both ways, as I suspect we’ll discover in the coming weeks… but I’m glad to hear reports that most people in Seoul are still masking today.) twitter.com/USofDisaster/s…

“There Will Come Soft Rains” was one of mine, for the longest time.

Though now I think it might be the dustbowl family tragedy “The Lamp at Noon” by Sinclair Ross. Which is CanLit, so most of Twitter won’t know it, so obligatory link:

blogs.ubc.ca/lled4492015/fi… twitter.com/bookishseawitc…

@jeeyonshim @jeffkahrs @ludopolitics *bonks self on head*

Yeah, that! 😉

@JustinHowe Ha, I was riffing on the idea of the seven turquoises representing the seven stars of the big dipper, which is a traditionally significant constellation across NE Asia.

And… stumbled onto the fact that Big Dipper Swords are actually a thing!

mandarinmansion.com/glossary/beidou

Brilliantly on point thread. twitter.com/olga_basso/sta…

@mcjulie @LarissaFae I’ve read that a painful/expensive sacrifice as the cost for joining a group makes people value that group membership more. I think there’s a degree of that involved: claiming you believe something you cannot even understand feels like it could fit into this sort of dynamic.

@mcjulie @LarissaFae Except it persists even in religions that achieve high levels of social control and severely punish people who dissent openly. I suspect it’s more insidious: investing belief in something overtly untrue takes huge emotional/psychological investment. @mcjulie @LarissaFae And with huge emotional/psychological investment comes great resistance to admitting a false belief. The Emperor’s New Clothes and all those bureaucrats who can’t admit they see nothing after everyone else has claimed to see them… and then can’t admit they were pretending.

@JustinHowe For me, bread, tomatoes, milk (though I’ll take oat milk) and coffee. That’s about it.

@LarissaFae @mcjulie @LarissaFae @mcjulie I remember telling a teacher, “This doesn’t make sense, I can SEE that it’s wine and bread,” and he did the song and dance and I was like, “Why would they make it so obvious that they’re BSing us? Is it to rub it in our faces?”

@mcjulie Seriously, yes, that.

Also, if you know “Ask a Mortician”:

@mcjulie There’s a whole handwavey thing about the bread and wine still seeming to be those things, but *really* being blood and flesh, and it being a “mystery.” @mcjulie My vague understanding is the process of figuring out this stuff was a partly reactive one, shaped by arguments about opinions that were deemed heretical. Like, “No, that can’t be true, that’s heretical. Wait, was is true, then? Er… this? This? This? Okay, let’s go with this.”

RT @debra_caplan: In 1959, Eugene Ionesco wrote the absurdist play Rhinoceros in which one by one, an entire town of people suddenly trans…

A fair bit of this is UK specific, but over here in South Korea, they’re following suit with the whole lack of measures + confusing messaging, so it’s only a matter of time before we’re all in the same big hearse boat. (Sigh.) twitter.com/danielgoyal/st…

RT @koryodynasty: Man in Korea who beat younger brother to death while drinking with him has been handed a *suspended* prison sentence give…

@marc_laidlaw @radiumskull Huh, I’ve heard it both ways: immune deficiency, or—more often, I’ve heard—a result of an overactive immune response to irritants. (Which abound here, thanks to bad pollution.)

Either way, the comment was odd enough to make me look at him with a “Huh?” expression for a second.

@marc_laidlaw I was! It was the same festival I saw Om Shanti Om, as well, which I really enjoyed a lot.

@jeremiahtolbert Into the Odd/Electric Bastionland and various hacks of it! (But you knew I’d say that.)

I suspect Ghostbusters would be pretty easy to do minimal prep and Actual Plays make it seem fun.

I haven’t played them yet, but some card-driven GMless PbtA games look promising too.

(I did point out that maybe people w/asthma are just being more careful, because… they have asthma? Which is a risk factor for more severe COVID? And they know how awful respiratory illness can be? He smiled and shrugged, and moved on…)

Saw an E.N.T. today for an ear infection. When he heard that I have asthma, he asked me about COVID status. Hearing that neither I nor my family have caught it yet, he told me, “None of my asthma patients have had it. I think people with asthma have strong immune systems.” Was he joking to lighten the mood? Dead serious? I have literally no idea.

(Most of the consult was in Korean, but this bit was in English and sometimes jokes don’t translate well. OTOH, I’ve had doctors say weirder things to me in complete seriousness, so who knows?)

@iampaulkerry Interesting… Thanks!

@marc_laidlaw I was lucky enough to see it screened twice on a big screen at a festival (same festival) here when the film was brand new.

(It wasn’t a huge screen, but a big one. I stayed up laaaate for the second screening.)

I am a bit confused: wasn’t the traditional mode of age reckoning mostly unofficial anyway? (I thought official documentation and laws all used the “international” age reckoning anyway.)

I can’t really see people just abandoning it overnight.
https://t.co/obctGJaN3N Also, is it wrong of me to suspect some ulterior motive rooted in kooky magical ideas—some “national astrological shift” or “a redirection of national 기” (as in “氣”)—or something?

Just a hunch…

@ahimsakerp Yeah, no commercially-published album cover would look like this.

(It’s better than some covers I’ve seen on Bandcamp, though!)

@xtinehlee I would have expected, “I like big 무 and I cannot lie… you other gardeners can’t deny…”

@ahimsakerp You’re saying it isn’t now? 😉

@marc_laidlaw I’m curious about what advances in the science of learning have to say about music. (I’m sort of stumbling toward picking up my old instruments and there’s some relearning involved, so…)

RT @Theresa_Chapple: her- I guess it’s okay to get COVID because we have tools to address it now. Nobody is dying from it anymore.
me- qu…

RT @edyong209: 🚨I wrote about the millions of people who lost loved ones to COVID, what they’ve gone through, and the many factors that hav…

@jeremiahtolbert Speculative evolution!

(There’s a lot of overlap with the paleo art people, in fact!)

@marc_laidlaw Is it any good? I remember a prof recommending THE INNER GAME OF MUSIC to me as a student. Made more impact on me years later, as a teacher, though.

RT @LivRNyyc: @thearkansasleft Someone that doesn’t understand that “socially liberal” policies are actually in the long run fiscally benef…

Check out the Aquatic Adventures Kickstarter! There’s just a few days left!

kickstarter.com/projects/drago… twitter.com/gordsellar/sta…

So, You’ve Angered a Sea God… gordsellar.com/2022/04/15/so-…

@JustinHowe @tweetsbymoi Well, part of it is the luck of the draw on random tables, but that’s what playtesting is for!

@tweetsbymoi @JustinHowe And yeah, I am curious to see how far you row this time. You never went further than a mile so far, so… 🙂

And there’s a baby. They have a baby that washed up on the beach to take care of and find a way to feed, on top of all the rest of the insanity.

@tweetsbymoi @GeekinKorea @JustinHowe Yeah, I don’t remember the comic book reference but supposedly Spit arrived on a corpse raft?