::A Geek in Korea::

The school’s starting to be remodeled. The construction crews took over the elevator, and there was a lift truck parked behind the school ferrying out trash and lifting up building supplies.  I arrived in the afternoon to teach. There was a huge banner surrounding two floors of the school that talked about the new franchise moving in soon.

The basement of our building is also getting remodeled. I guess it’s getting bought by the same franchise, but I have no idea if this is true. It used to be a naughty old men’s singing room. It’s the kind of place that featured naked women on the videos when you would sing the songs. Those sorts of places make me extremely uncomfortable to go into, and I avoid them. It only advertised at night and had some advertisements that our building manager would hang newspapers over until all the students would go home from the school. After hours I guess that place was open, but I leave work long before it started each night.

Imagine a school with a dirty singing room in the basement in the United States. I don’t think that’d do very well before someone would launch a moral crusade against it. Here it’s just part of the landscape and no one cares. Weird.

The remodeling wasn’t occurring on the floor where we teach classes yet. That’ll happen at the end of the month. We’re still getting impacted by all the work. It wasn’t just the view from the windows being covered up by the giant “Remodeling!” sign either. Because of the heating system, the second floor was getting unhealthy doses of paint fumes from the floors above and below us. Teaching tired kids on their winter vacation while smelling paint fumes all day is a wonderful way to develop a nasty headache.

I actually took my journal grading homework with me, went to a local coffeeshop and worked outside of school because I was so bothered by the fumes. I have a strong dislike of paint fumes, but I think all the Korean teachers that worked with me had their brains rotted away much earlier in the day and couldn’t smell it anymore by the time I arrived.

I’m tempted to sneak upstairs to see what they’ve done with the old materials from the previous school. They had blueprints and everything, and they’ve been working for more than two days, so it’s unlike any other Korean remodeling job I’ve seen take place at a school before. Usually they knock all the work out in no more than a weekend after completely gutting the place and starting from scratch. The lease from the last school was up on New Years Day, but that’s a holiday. They’ve probably spent three to five days working maximum.

Could they actually be trying to make the place inhabitable and well planned? They are painting, and also cutting carpets for the floors, so it must tbe one of the last steps in the procedure. I’m to woozy from the paint fumes to speculate when they might be finished working above, but I hope it’s sooner rather than later.

1. Don’t say “Assa!” anymore, because you sound like an idiot when you do.
2. Don’t take a ddongchim (finger playfully thrust up your ass) lying down. (Or standing up for that matter!)
3. Don’t let your kids give you dumb nicknames.
4. Don’t let anybody call you crazy in Korea.
5. Don’t call kids crazy and try to stand on some lame principle that “They should know how English is really spoken.” It only makes you sound like a pompous idiot.
6. If you’re bald, don’t let your kids touch your head.
7. If you’re fat, don’t let your kids touch your belly.
8. If you’re hairy, don’t let your kids rub your forearms.
9. Don’t tell your kids stupid lies about your home country. Don’t tell them that you’re an alien, even though it may be hilarious to them.
10. Never, ever hand over the power to punish your students to a Korean, whether it be your co-teacher or the owner of the school. You will soon find yourself completely powerless. (Which explains why I was furious about this)

Brian in Jeollanamdo (Oh, and I missed his attribution to The Joshing Gnome for the list, sorry) hits it out of the park with this essay about how Foreign teachers need to interact with students. He gives you some time tested tips about what you need to do to correct bad student behavior that has been ingrained in previous student/teacher interactions.  The whole “I’m your teacher, not your friend” thing is a huge barrier to first year Foreign teachers.

It is easy to sympathize with children when you first arrive in Korea because their whole education system seems so cruel and time consuming. Teachers aren’t doing the students any favors by being a “friend” instead of a teacher. Korean kids are going to study if you are here or not, and not getting anything done only wastes their time. If they wouldn’t do the same thing to a Korean teacher, don’t tolerate it in your class either.

You don’t need to lack compassion, but being an English Teaching monkey isn’t good. When students, or even worse, adults, do the attention getting “HELLO!” thing on the street for laughs at your expense, meeting it with anything but distain and pity is the wrong reaction. Don’t feed the monkey. It makes us all look bad and gives people outside the business the impression you shouldn’t be treated seriously. Seriously. Look at this guy:

Prime Example of An English Teaching Monkey

Don’t be that guy.

Our D&D group got to meet after a month of off time for holidays and different scheduling conflicts. This was our “reboot” mission, where we were admitting we couldn’t break the system with our party and needed to step back, address all the roles of the party and make sure we knew what we were doing. While my Genasi Warlord survived the last battle, I voluntarily made a Halfling Rogue to play as the “striker” in our party.

The role of a rogue striker is to do massive damage to one target, primarily by the means of getting combat advantage over an enemy and then using a class feature called sneak attack for lots of extra damage. Combat Advantage can be achieved in a number of different ways, such as through stealth, feints, or flanking. I tried to use all my tricks to take out foes.

All of this was taking place in the same town as our last party. The surviving members of the last group were still walking around,  but we just added new characters to the mix. It’s a “living world” style campaign, so when we turn up in town the stuff we did impacts what the other characters think of us.

We started the adventure with a skill/combat challenge.  There was another rogue in town operating as a carnie that had set up a game of chance. My character, Noz, the World’s Tallest Halfling, was best with a sling, and had to hit bottles off a set of targets. The first to knock off the most bottles wins, or something. The rogue cheated, so our party lost some gold. We upped the stakes a little with some negotiation, then rigged the game in our favor. We also cheated and won some of that money back. All’s fair when the party’s gold was on the line. I swore revenge on the carnie rogue for taking some of our gold. We will return to win back our money later. If it was our evil campaign, I would have just stabbed him. Oh how the times change.

Our first combat encounter as a party was a mission we took to test out our battle synergy. We had to protect a flock of sheep from some guard drakes. These were bipedal lizards, resembling the procompsognathus in Jurassic Park that killed Dennis Nedry (Newman).  One even spat acid on the face of our Wizard! We were fighting in a field full of sheep, but once our Dwarven fighter got up close and personal (and also surrounded and nearly eaten) by the drakes I got to use my sneak attack to deliver some serious damage. It was very satisfying to roll all those extra dice and start putting lizards down left and right.

The first encounter went swimmingly. We took down the drakes and collected an heirloom from the indebted farmer. I ended up getting a +1 magic dagger to stab people with more proficiently. YES! Magical daggers return to the thrower’s hand after each attack, so I didn’t have to worry about missing and being unarmed between each round. It also boosted my to hit chance to +10 per attack, which is great, and increased my already stellar damage ratios. I was delivering the pain in a big way, and was able to hit nearly everything thrown at us with a decent roll! When our cleric buffed the party, it got even easier to hit. There were times when all I had to do was not roll a “1″ on a twenty sided die to hit. That’s what you want to see in a striker who needs to take people out fast. I also won every throw for initiative, which is critical for more chances at sneak attack damage.

Our DM also let us level up mercifully, as we had been playing level 1 characters for the past few sessions and that can get to be a drag for people that wanted new powers to try out.  I got some advice about my build from other guys in the party to see what they thought I should take. I decided to up the size of the dice I roll when I backstab people. This is seriously the best part of the rogue class.

The next fight was a retread of the last encounter we had to run from. Same setup, with a hive kruthik waiting to try to take us down. We knew the tactics and also knew not to get caught in the breath weapon by surprise. We handled the battle well. I got dropped to -2 HP on the final round of combat because of some ongoing acid eating through my armor, but there was cleric waiting to heal me right away. No danger, but it’ll teach me to waste my Halfling “Reroll” ability on an attack from a minion, even if they do critical hit damage. The party was not supported by any other goblins this time around, we just went in with our crew and wanted to mop up all the experience we could.

Mission accomplished. Finally. As a reward, I got a new weapon that works as a dagger made from a skull. It has a special bonus to hit creatures larger than it’s wielder. Since I am a Halfling, nearly everything in the entire game qualifies for this bonus.  Nice! This was written into the adventure even before I was playing a small sized character, so it didn’t seem like a favor when I got my hands on it either. I would hate to feel like it was written in only for me. I’ve got two sweet daggers already and can spend my dough on some other magical item to make my guy an even more bad ass striker. The lack of low light vision might need to be fixed if I want to continue to function as our lookout.

This game after the long break and the defeat last time has really reinvigorated me. I was worried that a rogue would seem shallow after the helpful Warlord I had built, but it was a lot of fun. My character needs to be fleshed out. What I said at the table when introducing him was that he was the  “The World’s Tallest Halfling”, which is kind of a joke, but I might run with it. Lamest Circus Sideshow freak ever? That might work as a humorous background.

It was probably our best 4th Edition game so far, and I can’t wait to play again in 2009.

One sign you’ve been Korea too long is noticing how you are willing to eat increasingly strange kinds of pizza. The pizza above contains:

• Golden Sweet Potato baked crust
• Potatoes wedges as a topping
• Bacon and Corn
• Sour Cream
• Herbs and Cheese toppings
• Marinara sauce
• Crushed Nacho Chips topping

It sounds like a pizza made on a dare at a college dorm room right? Would you believe that the only thing about this pizza that I found odd were the crushed nacho chips as a topping. I had never seen that before and wondered if they’d still be crunchy after sitting on an pizza from across town. They added a little to the taste and helped absorb some of the pizza’s oil. Mr. Pizza is “Pizza for Women” after all. We ordered this pizza from Mr. Pizza. Mr. Pizza is hands down better than 95% of other Korean owned franchise pizza places. It’s really the only upscale Korean pizza place making Western style pizza worth eating. The toppings and designer pizzas are extremely bizarre and very Korean, but I haven’t had a bad Mr. Pizza pie yet (I’ve only had it a total of about five times though). All this and the pizza only came with one container of pickles on the side! It’s like they know people don’t eat all of them! I’ve completely left behind the standards of “normal” pizza these days. Bring on the weird stuff!

Well…not all of the weird stuff.

The solar New Year is when everyone in Korea eats some rice dumpling soup and adds a year to their age. It seems at first that there is a logic behind adding a year ignoring when someone is actually born, but when you factor in that Koreans count the time in the womb and then give children a birthday party at 100 days, it works out to be around a year from conception. Koreans play fast and loose with age in ways we foreigners don’t. I have yet to eat my rice cake soup, so that artificial ritual to add a year to my age hasn’t officially happened, but it’s already too late. People are already adding that extra year to my age, and since my birthday is in January, it’s a double whammy. For the next few days I’m two years older in Korean than my Western Age.

It’s not just my Korean age that is getting me down. My friend sent me a set of music tracks he’s been listening to for the past year. He and I used to host a radio show in college.  Of the tracks he’s listened to repeatedly, I had only heard two of the songs. Back in the day I was following music and hearing the new tracks before the radio stations were overplaying other people’s favorites. Back in the day I had time to listen to care about radio. 90% of the time my listening during walks or commuting to work is dominated by podcasts, and I’m annoyed when I have to dip into my music folder to pick something to listen to. It feels unproductive. I still like music and dig my favorite artists, but daily exposure to good music in Korea through media is nonexistent.

I’ve even taken up postions of a grouchy old man in the recent “SHINee vs. Big Bang” feud that has overtaken the school. A few weeks ago it was all about the Wonder Girls. They are now old hat, and I can’t be bothered to keep up with the trends of these students these days. Big Bang is wildly popular with pre-teens that have no taste and base their preferences for pop groups on the most androgynous band members. There is a literal “Big Bang” gang at my school with matching official fan coats that mocks their classmate’s musical tastes. The SHINee fans are small but vocal. They suck equally as bad as Big Bang but are the “alternative”. The students opposition to Big Bang usually arises out of a “Whatever my sister likes, I like the opposite,” mentality. There haven’t been any boy band based fights yet in class, but judging by the children’s musical taste it would probably a Sharks vs. Jets style musical number with tasteful trendy clothing.

Whenever anyone starts arguing why their particular group of dancing and singing boys is better than anyone else’s I just say, “Bah, kids today! Bands in my day had to actually know how to play musical instruments, and they didn’t have to dance around all the time! Why would anyone listen to pop music! You don’t even know what good music is! GET OFF MY LAWN!”

The only class that didn’t excel at making me feel like a decrepit old man this week was a class that reads about the rainforest in a storybook. We were reading about the jaguar, king of the jungle. The text read, “The jaguar is powerful and dangerous.” The students all said, “Dan-ger-oussss,” then shouted out,”That’s a Michael Jackson song!” How a group of ten year old Korean children knew the lyrics to a 1991 song is beyond me. Watching Michael Jackson dance with no band on stage, I guess things really aren’t that different these days.

Pop music has always sucked.

I loved the first Final Fantasty Tactics game on the Playstation. It is probably my favorite PSX title ever. I played daily for hours the entire summer after freshman year in college. Not only did it keep me from spending a ton of cash on other games due to longevity, but it also made me a fan of strategy games in general. Leveling up, creating death squads that used different abilities in combination to devistate opponents, and killing Chocobos was all I did that summer while I lived in my parent’s attic.

When I got to Korea, one of the games I was most excited about on the GBA was Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. The game had a different feel than the original FFT. There were beings in the game called “Judges” that dictated the rules of battle. For example, you could be told that for a mission you weren’t allowed to cast spells, or move more than one square at a time. These rules got broken from time to time, and would send your character to jail. From there you had to pay to get the character back. While this added challenge, some of the rules were poorly worded, or vague. It led to a lot of situations like this. The main problem I had with Final Fantasy Tactics Advance was that each turn took FOREVER to execute. Everything took too long to finish executing: walking, attacking, casting spells. Everything.

I had heard mixed things about Final Fantasy Tactics Advance 2. People that hated the Judge system continued hating on the game, and people that will play anything with Final Fantasy in the title played it and loved it. I didn’t import it early, which shows how much I thought Final Fantasy Tactics Advance needed improvement before I’d consider a further investment in the franchise. It went from a “Day One” purchase to a wait and get it used if possible title.

I finally found a copy at out local shop and bought it without thinking. On the ride home on the subway I had some mild buyer’s remorse. “What had I done? I haven’t touched my Nintendo DS since I got my Cowon O2. When do my eyeballs have time to play a game when I’m busy watching or listening to podcasts all the time? Do I really want to carry around two pocket sized amusement devices? Will I still be into this gameplay after all these years?”

After two days of owning the game I’m about ten hours into the game. My doubts have been destroyed. It’s a marked improvement over FFTA. The Nintendo DS version of the game is much faster between rounds, and the Judge’s system has been “fixed”. Instead of punishments, they present the rule breaking as a removal of bonuses. Functionally it’s about the same, because you get more free loot for following the rules than breaking them, but it’s not as big a deal to follow rules. The rules are also posted on the second screen at all times, so you know what you need to watch out for. Also, you get to pick a perk you keep as long as you follow rules. This gives you an incentive in the game to stick to the rules even though breaking them from time to time would give you an even better benefit. Laws can still screw you over from time to time, but I haven’t had to juggle three different rules at once and try to remember picky details like if a sword is technically a light blade, heavy blade or a rapier once.

The story is very open ended, and you can advance the story at your own pace. Unlocking new weapons and classes is kind of funky at the moment. I have loads of swords and other items I can’t use because I don’t have the beginning level classes finished well enough to earn more obscure classes. It’s a big tease to unlock a new weapon for an entirely new class and have no idea of the requirements how to use the weapon in the first place. There are a lot of nice touches to keep people playing just one more round, and the way they’ve balanced the classes by race (also in FFTA) stops you from building a uniform death squad right away. By this point in FFTA I think I had all the classes I used for the rest of the game, or near enough to it that the differences hardly mattered. Right now there are multiple dozens of more classes I haven’t even seen yet. I’m sure there are some broken classes, just like the other games, but I have yet to find those classes yet.

The game has multiple settings at the beginning for difficulty. I set it on HARD and didn’t look back. There have been a few missions at the eight hour mark that have proved challenging enough that I’m happy with my purchase. FFTA never felt like a real strategy game because it was so easy, but FFTA has a much better difficulty presented so far. It’s not like the most difficult battles in FFT, but it’s consistently down to making the right choices in units, abilities, and equipment loads that means that you can’t make mistakes often and still survive. It’s also pretty forgiving about death. Losing a character in battle doesn’t kill them outright like it did in FFT. I wish there was a “superhard” difficulty that brought that option back. I’m not obsessive/compulsive enough to play Fire Emblem, but I do play Final Fantasy Tactics with a “can’t lose anyone” obsessive slant.

I’m happy to have another long lasting game to carry around with me when I’m in the house. It’s basically the perfect bathroom game. I won’t play it at work because children freak out about teachers having Nintendo DS games they don’t know about, but I think I’ll get some mileage out of this game.

I got to work to discover that my computer had not been replaced. Damn. Today was my weekly testing period, so I spent a frantic planning period finishing the tests I had already completed weeks ago only to be robbed when my computer died yesterday. I got the test done on a coworker’s computer, much to the dismay of my students that were hoping to get a reprieve. There was no way I was going to miss having tests, because I’ve finally got a routine going where the students actually expect a test and prepare for it before class begins.

At least, I HAD a routine set up.

In the last testing period of the day significant numbers of students are too unfocused to spend time studying. One student ripped half his fingernail off in class out of boredom. He spend the rest of his study time mopping up blood with a tissue instead of studying for the test. Other students are too concerned with things like detentions for failing their tests to actually take the step of studying.

Same mistakes every week in this class keep them from passing. All they need is 50%, and if they had any kind of study strategy they could EASILY get this every time.These are not challenging tests. They are patterned to be exactly the same. My first class has caught on and now have the majority of people passing each time. I’d like this class to continue to run into a brick wall until they figure out that they hold their fate in their hands in regards to the amount of time they spend at the school. I’m happy to retest them all if they continue to fail my test.

Test-Anxiety boy failed his test today and collapsed on the floor crying. He missed the cut by two points. I don’t like to have him fail because he is so dramatic about it. I didn’t give him a single bit of attention and continued grading. I told him he could go outside to vomit and cry like he usually needs to. He went to the secretary to explain that he was unable to stay after class today because his aunt was picking him up and he needed to leave time with her. He was saying, in a round about way, “If you hold me after class and my mom finds out I didn’t meet my aunt on time, I’m going to get my butt kicked all day today and tomorrow.” He had plans that were time dependent that I had no way of knowing about. Had he told ME this before class I would have let him go out of class anyway without all the crying.

The secretary came in and asked if the students were taking a test. I said I always give a test and they need to score over 50% to go home, otherwise they have to finish taking the test again, which takes a maximum of twenty more minutes. I was finished grading half the tests  when she suddenly declared, “Today is the last day of the year, tomorrow is a holiday, so there will be no retesting today!”

I was pretty furious. It’s not like I want to waste these kids time, but the motivation to go home early has improved one of my classes’ grades on these tests. Why would she go out of her way to say something she had no business deciding. The secretary isn’t a teacher. She went and did that without asking my opinion case by case. If she was worried because that boy was crying, again, then she didn’t need to let everyone off the hook. Other students have carved out time sensitive exemptions in the same class before, and it’s not like it’s that big of a deal to keep students for 20 minutes before they walk home.

Immediately after they heard the news, the rest of the students handed in their tests. They are happy to fail without even answering questions because she had kneecapped me in front of the entire class. I had been handing out their homework early so faster students could work while other students completed their tests. Now they had the rest of the period to work as a team to finish the work early.

There are students far worse than Test Anxiety boy that absolutely need their feet held to the fire to make them study, and she ruined that. Literal months of work on my part building up this discipline system to get them studying was tossed aside. Now whenever students fail a test of mine they know that making a big enough scene will get them out of it, and possibly the rest of the class too if they complain enough. That’ll be just great next time I hand out a test. The tests will continue, but I don’t think the improvement I’ve seen in other classes will be present in the class she let go out early.

I worked to restore some of the discipline I lost by rewarding the students that actually passed instead of punishing the students that failed. That only works with students that seek positive attention instead of only trying to avoid negative attention, which was what I was using before. Some students just don’t seek out rewards, they only run from danger.

I’m really annoyed that someone stepped in and went over my head to introduce a policy I think is ineffective in my class. If the students just sought out the positive attention from passing, none of this would be an issue. If the secretary wanted to talk to me about holding too many students for failing after class, the proper location wasn’t in the classroom without my approval. It makes her look like the good guy with authority, while I’m stuck being the bad guy teacher.  I don’t care about my students disliking me if they can’t pass a simple test, but if they would study out of spite, at least they’d IMPROVE which is the WHOLE POINT.

I need some sort of discipline system, because some of my classes are fucking awful and she doesn’t step in to break up fights, punish children, or deal with any of the annoying things I need to face when the discipline structure breaks down. If she’s going to make a call in one of my classes, she can deal with the fallout in all my classes.

I got to work this morning on time. I finished my prep work and entered in my computer planning. That’s about all that went right. The computer system went down because my chilly coworkers plugged in too many heaters and blew a bunch of fuses. The reason they are so cold is because they close the office door to the lobby of the school, where the main heater resides. They close the door because they don’t let children in the office anymore so they can spend their time gossiping in Korean about the attractiveness of various Korean stars. Their cold hearts must be lowering the temperature of the room, because I never found it cold in the office until they started working there.

I’m fine in the office without a heater…as long as my DESKTOP COMPUTER THAT I WORK ON can heat up the room. Since they blew all the fuses in the office, I was effectively cut off from any further paper work for the rest of the day. When the electrician came, he got the computers working…ALL EXCEPT MINE. They had damaged my machine, possibly with all the tripped fuses they caused. My tests for tomorrow are on that machine. I’m going to be angry if all my early work got destroyed because they don’t keep a door open.

After that, I happened to need to take a trip to a different part of town. Because of the Daejeon bus service changing their routes, the bus that I thought I had to take was actually headed in the exact opposite direction. I got taken far out in the middle of nowhere where the bus then parked. That’s when my wife called to tell me that I should just avoid the bus entirely because she checked online and there were so many people complaining about the changes  that there was little chance I’d find the right bus. I should just take a taxi, eat the expense, and find out the proper bus to the location later. OOPS!

She talked to the bus driver, who then came over and explained why I was wrong getting on the bus. “You wanted the bus on the OTHER side of the street.” The answer was clear on the map on the bus you couldn’t possibly have know about unless you were ON THE  BUS READING IT! The bus stop materials show the route of the bus, but I didn’t have time to figure out what would be the next stop when I was reading the materials before the bus came. I took a guess. I had a 50% shot of picking the right bus. Live and learn.

I had a long ride back into town, then I had to hear the shouts of different people that also were dissatisfied with the bus service at each stop. It’s lovely listening to pissed off old ladies cursing at bus drivers loud enough to drown out my earphones when you feel bus sick from the motion of the ride. By the time I got to my stop I lept off the bus. I could have walked to my destination, or walked to a subway stop that would have taken me to the right destination more directly. All told it took me an extra hour to get where I wanted. Buses are now no longer for me. Right now I’m still queasy thinking about the ride.

It was NOT A GOOD DAY.

Our DM was out of town, so our scheduled game of Dungeons and Dragons got delayed to the new year. Since no one wanted to run a session on top of their characters, I  had some friends over this past weekend just to chill out and not bring their dice. I asked very politely to my wife, who has spent the past few weeks either in bed, in the bathroom sick, or burping because of gas if this was acceptable. She said it would be okay for them to visit, and her word goes at least until her morning-afternoon-night sickness subsides. She said that she would just stay in the bedroom and rest while we played Wii.

Instead, a Korean fiancée of one of the guys came over to show off her new ring and chat while we played video games. I don’t think my wife wanted to admit it, but she was happy to have the company too. Someone else to share her agony with. Plus, they brought delicious peanut butter cookies.

The Wii got some multiplayer use for once. First my friends and I tried out WiiWare Bomberman. I had already unlocked the modes that let me play as a Mii, but after taking it online a few times I hadn’t played it for a while. It is a party game at the core, and while bombing online is fun, it’s never better than that “In your FACE!” sort of bombing that takes place when people visit. The other players were either brand new to the series or beginners. They wanted the CPUs set to easy. We played a few rounds in each mode. Part of the fun of Bomberman is the hectic, “Oh crap, what now” sort of beginning it throws you into. Everyone can play, but not knowing what is good or bad tile to pick up puts you at a disadvantage. By the end I was winning a fair share of the games and they started teaming up on me. If I was getting pitted against Normal AI I wouldn’t have outshone anyone, as that game usually gets the best of me.

After they got bored with Bomberman, one of them asked me if I got that “World of Goo” game I had been ranting about. I had gotten about half way through that game when I stopped. I really love that game, but my wife uses the TV after work, and that game gets me stressed. I don’t liked to play it before work. Since I play that game alone, some of the levels I found really challenging were much easier when they played it as a team. They also had excellent strategy and communication skills. They even beat a level I had stopped on because the previous level had stressed me out too much to continue. It turned out to be much more simple than I expected. They also had the next level beat, but lost at the last second before we turned off the Wii to go to dinner.

I got to show them some of the sights in my neighborhood. They were shocked to learn there was a “Sexy Realdoll Love Room” down the street from my apartment. It’s in the same building as a transgender bar, and the singing room I took my friends when they visited Korea. They joked that the bachelor party for the DM had to end up taking him to that place. I’m hoping that was just a fun little joke.

Next week we should be back on schedule playing again. Still, it was a fun time and it was kind of nice not to talk about builds, monsters, and magic for once.

This astounding awkward sign was found by a friend while we were in a 7-11. We had just finished eating a spicy chicken dish, and were using the change we got back on ice cream. He went to throw away his wrapper and found this sign. He said something like, “I wonder if anyone has put that sign to the test and had a horrific experience as a result.”

It would be rather terrible to see a confused foreigner think there was a dead animal drop off point located in a convenience store. Make all the callous Korean dog jokes you want, but the “PET” in question refers to “Polyethylene Terephthalate” soft drink bottles, and is used to denote the recycling of water or sode bottles that are purchased at the store.

At least we HOPE that’s what they are talking about.