Sorrow

It has been a while since my last post, and if anyone is still reading, please click through to read the following article on the plight of copy editors.

I am a copy editor. I do not work in journalism, exactly, though perhaps I work on its academic fringe. I am a copy editor of financial research; I prepare research for global distribution, online and in dead-tree journals. My job is to take what you have written, what you have spent hours, days, or perhaps even years to create, and to turn it into prose that reflects your intelligence and hard work. I eliminate redundancies, correct logical errors, and, overall, make your work look good and be easily understood. Yes, the factual problems are yours, and the general concept of the paper will not benefit from my efforts, but when I'm done, you'll know.

Copy editors are under-appreciated. They always have been and they always will be. It is unfortunate that the world of the Internet, where news is posted ad infinitum, seems less willing to embrace the perfectionism once requisite for news sources.

For me, when I read news online and find large numbers and types of mistakes, I am less willing to accept the article at its word. For me, these mistakes signify a lack of caring, which in turn make me suspicious of any claims made within. For instance, if you can't figure out which type of dash to use, en or em, why should I believe that 365 peopled died in an airline accident. Maybe it was 36.5. It could have been 3.65 people who died in a hang-gliding accident.

Just know: A copy editor is your last line of defense against mistakes and embarrassment. We are full of knowledge--useful and useless--because we read all day, every day, for a living. Appreciate your copy editor, help him or her do their job, and appreciate it when they point out your mistakes. After all, that's why you need them.

Blinky's Camera?

From China (Where else?). I want one, but in theory, I can't use it because I only have two eyes and would be incapable of viewing anything in three dimensions. Via Neatorama.

Landscapes

From today's New York Times, I got a look at the otherworldly landscapes of photographer Sze Tsung Leong, a Chinese American.


Of note in his works is that in each photograph the horizon line falls at the same point, allowing his photos to be lined up end-to-end, and viewed as a constant panorama, despite the fact that each photograph is of a far-off destination. Some examples of locations include Germany, Egypt, and Inner Mongolia (Chinese). Many of his photos are slightly overexposed, giving a ghostly feel to some thriving metropolitan areas, but by taking such wide photographs and maintaining the ratio of earth to sky, Sze Tsung Leong has compiled a body of work that will be fascinating to any and all interested in travel and/or photography. I look forward to applying the horizon line technique to some of my photographs. You can check out the article and the interactive presentation at the New York Times' Website.

The Internet is for Porn

This music video explicates my entire outlook on life and the many uses of the Internet.



Via Youtube via rbcp.

Greatest. Thing. Ever.

This is the greatest thing I've ever seen. E V E R. It's called Cooking with Coolio and you can find it on MyDamnChannel.com.



Things to love about Cooking with Coolio:
1. Shaka Zulu!
2. The Sauce Girls
3. Autographed bell peppers
4. Coolio waving a knife around carelessly
5. Cooking + Profanity
6. Teasing white people

I know what I'm doing at work tomorrow.

"Sex Infections"?

I bring this article from the New York Times to your attention for two reasons:

1) The headline
2) The implications of the content

First, the headline. I thought the term was "STD", not "Sex Infection". I too have a sex infection, an infection to have sex. Sex, according to the New York Times, is a disease with which one can actually be infected, and Baby... I've got it and I want to share it with you! Now on to more serious matters, you buxom, writhing, bipedal petri dish.

Second, the content. As a student of public universities the world over, I know the statistics. There were posters affixed to health center, dormitory, and dining hall walls informing the hot, sweaty (and sex-infected) student body about the chances of waking with fleas should one lay with dogs.

According the the new study brought to our attention today, the chances of waking with fleas if you go black and don't go back are much higher than if you are ragin' for caucasians. In their test for four major flea species (HPV, herpes, chlamydia, and trichomoniasis [some sort of parasite, eww...]), 50% of fine, mocha-hued women tested positive for one of the four. For those suffering from a debilitating melanin imbalance, the results are a filthy 20%.

For you guys who can't do math? This means that the sorority girl you picked up at the sports bar in a Bud Lite-induced stupor and whom you schtupped with reckless abandon without a condom had a 1-in-5 chance of infecting you, and not with sex disease - with itchy, burns-when-I-pee syndrome. When you're considering an evening with a young Nubian princess, just flip a coin; your chances will be the same.

But this may be the best part! These are teenagers! Just imagine the numbers AFTER a five-year program at a state university. When they graduate and get their first jobs, they should just give out cards listing what diseases they have so that you can match them with yours and not catch anything new!

Finally, don't be so down on your prospects for disease-free carnal knowledge! They say that for two of the diseases, condoms are relatively INEFFECTIVE! Do yourself a favor: spank it.

Happy snapper season!

Flickr in Seoul

There's a fantastic photography group in Seoul called, appropriately, Flickr in Seoul. We meet every two weeks on Sunday and take photographs at locations around Seoul. If anyone is interested, you can join the group (which is free, of course) or just check out our collective photos online at Flickr.com. Also, feel free to click through to see my pictures by clicking the one below or on the slide show in the upper-right-hand corner.

Awesome

Catherine Chalmers is my hero. She raises animals and feeds them to each other while photographing the entire process. This is a concept with many facets ranging from intriguing to gross to natural to contrived, and any of her photos can bring out any of these things at any time, sometimes all at once. These pictures are intended to bring about consideration of the food chain, and it works. She also has a series of photographs starring American cockroaches and houseflies, among other creatures.

You can check out her photographs at her CatherineChalmers.com. You can listen to a great interview with Catherine on This American Life from 2005, which you can listen to for free here.

Rachel Papo Photography

Rachel Papo, an fellow Ohioan and Israeli, has created a fascinating photo documentary of life for Israeli girls in the military. The photos document a stark contrast between femininity, adolescence, and militarism. I don't really know that much about being in the military-and I don't want to-but these pictures are eye-opening and yet sad. I can't imagine being ripped away from home during the most free years of my life and forced to run around in the desert with a gun preparing for the inevitable conflict resulting from a centuries-old fight for land. (Oh, and the women are beautiful in a heavily armed way.)

Link: Rachel Papo: Serial No. 3817131

(chuckle) E-Sports

Perhaps you don't know how popular online gaming is in Korea. Perhaps you've been locked up in a third-world prison for the last ten years or have the sensory capabilities of Helen Keller.

From smoky, 24-hour Internet cafes to stadium-style competitions, almost one-quarter of Korea's population, and it's not just for kids anymore, participates in online gaming. There are many magazines, Websites, and other media dedicated to online gaming, and there is one full-time gaming channel, Ongamenet, that has amazing production value and is extremely popular. And they all play StarCraft.

I don't really want to debate the nature of the word "E-Sports" due to the fact that I'd end up throwing things and punching a Korean person, but I'll say this: Two of the most loathsome linguistic trends (sticking an "e" before other words and calling games "sports") have come together to create the semantic Hellspawn that is Korean entertainment.

Monocle (Oh, why must a subscription cost so much?!) produced a great video primer on this aspect of modern Korean culture. Watch the video. Then, cry for Korea.

Welcome to the Suck

So Namdemun, the Republic of Korea's super-best-#1 symbol of national pride and the oldest wooden structure on the peninsula burned down.

Reasons:
1. Arson (this has pretty much been confirmed and someone has been arrested)
2. Electrical fire (possible, but unlikely)
3. "Mystical Forces": Apparently, Namdemun was built, in part, to protect the once-walled city of Seoul from the fire-causing forces of Mt. Gwanaksan. Geomancy was once quite popular and is much like Fung Shui on a much grander scale.

This is Asia and someone is going to get skewered for this. Possible culprits include KT Security and some members of the Interior Ministry. Basically, it's a 600-year-old wooden building and the only form of fire protection was three or four fire extinguishers around the premises. A sprinkler system would have been a great help, but nobody wanted to damage the building to put it in. I guess it's after the fact, but isn't a slightly modernized building better than no building at all?

But wait, there's more! The building was monitored by a closed-circuit television system. DURING THE DAY ONLY!

Sorry, Korea. This was completely preventable and is basically your fault. I feel really sorry for whomever they pin this on.

Some users of Flickr in Seoul were on the scene and have taken some excellent and extremely powerful pictures of the tragedy in progress and after the fact. Check them out here, but please respect their copyrights.
Picture at top courtesy of "sean in japan" under a cc-by-sa license.

Archiving Digital Photography

My day began as it often does, with reading the New York Times. The Times had an excellent article on the lost-and-now-found negatives of Robert Capa. Their long journey from Spain to Mexico and now to New York for archiving led me to consider the future of digital photography and how the images of today will be preserved for the future.

With film, distribution and reproduction could be accomplished without the negatives, though until digital retouching, the quality and perhaps the intricacies of the image would erode, leaving an image diminished and false.

With digital photography, however, a series of 1s and 0s can be reproduced forever with no loss of quality. 1s and 0s do not degrade, do not become brittled and yellowed with passing time. Posting one's photographs to the Internet, either to Flickr or a blog, in some ways archives the images for all eternity. The rights of ownership may transfer, perhaps leading to future
precedent- setting court battles concerning publishing rights and residuals, but the photos will not be lost. It will be interesting, and somewhat disheartening, to see different inheriting factions fighting over advertising revenues from blogs and the rights to post and remove photos from Flickr and other media. But from any Website, we can copy files, strings of 1s and 0s that represent artistic vision, and keep them for ourselves. The rights may have been pulled and the photos dropped onto a portable hard drive and stuck in a safe deposit box by their legal guardian, but the images will still exist and will be available should they ever be needed again.

The rise of digital photography has resulted in a surge of amateur photographers. Perhaps, however, this popularity has lead to a dilution of the power of a single photograph or photographer. Today's world-class photographers must exceed the levels of what has been done before in order to capture our increasingly valuable attention. Is photography obsolete in the era of Photoshop and YouTube? I doubt it, but I think the nature of its importance is changing; in some ways becoming more obscure, but in others bringing it to the forefront of our awareness of the world and global interactions.

Our online presences are forever, for right now, and only time will tell how our stories and our images will be presented henceforth.

Dear Micro$oft,

Please go fuck yourself. I've put up with your shit long enough. The fact that you created new file extensions for Word 2007 that are incompatible with any other iteration of your buggy software are irritating; but the fact that you expect me to download another piece of software, the no-doubt worthless Document Viewer, is beyond even your most asinine tricks to date. Every time I manage to get rid of some vulnerable and predictably unstable program of yours, you force me to download another one just to COPY AND FUCKING PASTE some text into a compatible format for Word 2003.

How 'bout this? Just make it work. Deploy a patch for Word 2003. I don't need the hassle of more shitty software to read a file I already have in a program I already have. Again, fuck you, 개새기!

Love,

Corey

Mmm... Brunch

Positive News from the International Herald Tribune:

SEOUL: When she returned to Seoul in 2000 after 10 years in New York City, Park Su Ji introduced her fellow Koreans to an exotic way to socialize over food: "brunch."

"I really missed brunch but didn't find any brunch restaurants," Park said. So in the spring of 2005, she opened Suji's, a restaurant that serves toasted bagels and blueberry pancakes, among other brunch staples, in a setting that features black-and-white photographs of the Chrysler Building and Union Square in New York...

This is old news, but click here to read the rest of the story.

Via: Gridskipper

PSA: I moved!

Dear Friends,

Thanks to those who have been keeping up with my status abroad and I'm sorry I haven't written in a long time. There are a lot of posts on their way as soon as I get my fiber-optic lifeline hooked up, so keep checking back!

Anyway, for those who didn't know, I got a new job and I moved. I am now an editor at the Korea Institute for International Economic Policy, the leading government-funded think tank on such pressing issues as Korean reunification, Chinese FTAs and economic development, and financial education. This means no more working until 10:00pm, no more screaming children, no more bitchy mothers, no more attempted suicide, and the enjoyment of commuting in the most densely populated city in the word. Oh the wonders that comprise my life!

In keeping with my tradition of massive, life-altering change, I also moved further into the city. For Seoul people, I now live just a short jump from Samseong Station on the ever-busy green line, which is the same station as COEX mall and the Korea World Trade Center, where you can find the Kimchi Field Museum, aquarium, and not one but THREE Starbucks, two Cafe Pascuccis, and two Coffee Beans in the same building. I'm twitching just thinking about it. Hit me up if you're in the neighborhood.

My phone number is the same as it was, though I no longer have a land line, and of course I'm always checking my e-mail. You can also, *shudder*, reach me on Facebook, MySpace, or LinkedIn because I'm social-networked up to my loins. Again, check back soon for some more fascinating information about being a minority in Seoul, and an unhealthy dose of my rapier wit.

I wanna' give a shout-out to Tex, Big Dave, and my homie Slick Willy!

How To Write an E-Mail

I live overseas and I use e-mail for the majority of my communication needs. I also receive some really, really poorly written e-mails from people I hold in high esteem. STOP IT! The Wired How-To Wiki provides the following guidelines for writing e-mail, as does the blog of Guy Kawasaki (VC, evangelist, etc.). Though I agree with most of what is written in both of these articles, I'm not sure I agree with all of it. Feel free to comment with your preferred e-mail style tips.

Click here to read the Wired article.

Guy Kawasaki has what I view to be more complete, more useful tips for e-mailing, which you can find here and should read immediately if you ever plan to send another e-mail. I especially like "add a good signature," which a lot of people don't. I want to know who you are instead of having to try to find your organization's Website, find the contacts page, and hope and pray to Jesus that you're on there. COME ON!

I Love Weekends

Every Sunday is a day of regret: regret for time wasted in front of the TV and for parties missed. Not to worry, though, because another weekend is only five days away.

Doorways

I do so like little doorways. The make me see so HUGE! RAH! I'm like a little Western Godzilla. Enjoy my visage from abroad and dwell upon my great accomplishments.

Fortress near Insadong, Continued

Here are some pictures of the performance taking place in the fortress in the previous post. I wasn't exactly sure what was going on for most of it, and one of these creatures that appears to be a woman is most certainly not. For another cultural reference regarding cross-dressing and gender-bending, watch the movie "The King and Clown" (translation is not exact). Also, you can see more pictures of the fortress in the background behind and next to the stage.

Fortress near Insadong

A couple of weeks ago, on a trip to Insadong, we hear musing. We walked around the corner to find a big stone wall and a large gate house (below). Through the gate house we found a large open courtyard filled with Korea's finest senior citizens. They were there to see a free performance, but the performance was over or hadn't started yet (we found out later which). Here are some pictures from the fortress we had entered. I will put the pictures of the performance in the next post to keep this a little shorter.






One of the things I think is the most interesting is the juxtaposition of old and new that is so common in Asia. I find the picture above to be a great example with three very clear styles visible. The modern city of Seoul is just built up around these things as if they, too, were just office buildings and apartment complexes. There are certain considerations made for their antiquity, but they are still very close to the newer structures. In other places in the city, you can see the effects of pollution and acid rain on the structures, and some have even been cleaned and encased in glass to keep them safe.

Buy a Daewoo

Meet Kim. During the day, Kim works as a secretary at a law firm and is saving money for a trip to Cancun during Spring break. To pay for college, Kim works as eye candy for Daewoo. She enjoys long walks on the beach, mai tais, and large groups of old men with DSLRs taking very, very close-up pictures of her exposed midriff.



Meet Jennifer. Jennifer is a retired CEO who has taken up spokesmodeling as a form of recreation. It's another way to boost her already giant ego. For fun, Jennifer plays polo, races exotic cars, and volunteers as a dominatrix at the under-privileged submissives' shelter.



Observe the group of men with cameras on the right in this picture. Perverts. Only perverts would take pictures of a spokesmodel (Kim) from two feet away. Only perverts. Did I mention that this entire event is in the middle of a huge train station? Perverts.

Dongdemun

There is a giant market in the center of Seoul where they sell bootleg soccer jerseys, among other things, and it is called Dongdemun (Dong-day-moon). I have a strong affection for bootleg soccer jerseys, so off we went. Pictures of the market will come after another trip, but there are some pictures of the area around Dongdemun, which is at Seoul Station.


In Seoul, there is quite a variety of architectural styles, from Oriental to European to Revival to Contemporary. I think that this picture gives a good taste of the randomness.

Summer and I pose for a picture in front of a convenience store.

This is the fountain at Seoul Station. It wasn't running (because it had been raining), but it still has some very nice adornments in the "Heroes of our Country" style that I saw so much in Russia.

This is a nice photo of the cleavage building, which is also at Seoul Station.
(Update: Thanks to Jon Allen for pointing out that this is the new post office building. Jon has a great blog which you can check out here. Lift and seperate Jon, lift and seperate.)

The next three photos are of a fountain outside of Dongdemun, which is the building on the left in the picture. It is a very, very large building and stretches for several city blocks, which you can kind of see. The fountain is actually in a stream, and it changes colors as it shoots up in the air. There are walkways all the way down the stream and there are seats along these walkways where people can sit and watch the fountain. Of course, there is a man with a baton to keep people from going in and enjoying themselves.


To get home from Dongdemun, we took the last subway trip of the night. There was a young man resting his eyes on the subway and he kept dropping things, including his phone and wallet, which I and others would just stick back into his pockets or hands. The man to his left just kept reading the paper and pretending that he wasn't there. A good end to a good night.

Goddamn it!

This will be twice, TWICE, in a row that I have lost my job to some reflexive-consonant-using Indian sitting in a cubicle in the outskirts of Delhi.

According to the Korea times, a company will be offering English instruction via the Internet for much less money than what is currently charged by English academies such as the one at which I work. I haven't checked out pricing yet, but if they can deliver half the product for one-quarter of the price, we're all screwed.

Mom, clear out my bedroom; I'm coming home.

Indians to Teach English via Internet By Cho Jin-seo
Staff Reporter (Korea Times)

An Indian company is tapping the lucrative English education market in South Korea with a person-to-person online tutoring service at an Indian price, known as e-tutoring, or "education outsourcing.''

Krishnan Ganesh, the founder and the CEO of TutorVista, said the Bangalore-based firm is preparing to open a Korean-language site this month to launch full e-tutoring programs for individual students and for companies.

He also said that some 50 Korean students are already enrolled at general English programs which offer unlimited, 24-hour-open tutoring at only $100 per month, and about 200 more are in more expensive SAT, TOEFL, GMAT and GRE examination preparation courses taught by Indian teachers in real time.

"We spent six months of research in the Korean and Chinese markets,'' he said in a telephone interview with The Korea Times this week. "There is a small market on the top of the pyramid for native English-speaking teachers. That comes at $30 or $40 per hour and that is affordable only by the rich.

Hat Day!

This past week we celebrated Hat Day. After walking around complimenting random passers-by on their fine choice of head-wear in honor of this holiday, we drank in our hats. Simple. Fun. Ridiculous. The problem, unfortunately, is that I don't have a single picture from hat day. I hope that this picture will be a consolation prize for those who were not lucky enough to see me wearing my hat.

This is a hat of the Korean people who lived on Russian lands for so long. I think it is quite stylish, though not as functional as I like my hats to be.

Hat via English Russia

The Crane Game

They're everywhere. Really, they're on almost every street corner, usually outside of convenient stores, which really are on every street corner. Koreans love them. Why do they love them? Because the prizes are great, it's cheap to play, and it's easy to win. You get six tries for the equivalent of $1, and if you're not entirely blind, you get something almost every time.

So what can you get, you might ask? Everything from butane lighters to radio-controlled cars, video games, and mp3 players. What did I win tonight in front of my local Family Mart? I'm glad you asked. Something useful, something wonderful, something absolutely charming. Below you can view the box it came in. Or maybe I should say "they".


Inside the box of SexyLine "for glamorous girl" was my prize: a pair of pretty gray and pink panties. HOT! If only I had a girlfriend to give them too. Check 'em out in greater detail below.

"Supergirls" indeed. Only a super girl would wear these. I guess I'll just have to go find one. Time to find some coins so I can go play again. I'll try to post some pics of the machines and more prizes soon.