A conversational overview of WTF the deal is with Koreas right now...

I was chatting with my sister, who doesn't keep up with current events like I do - and partly as a joke and partly for something for her to read as she tried killing the work day she asked for a history of what the news is on Korea. I wanted to see how much I could accomplish in a five-minute blurb. Here is the comprehensive low-brow description of what is going down and the history behind it.

So, Prior to the US involvement in WWII, The Japanese face-fucked most of East Asia into submission and made them part of their illustrious Empire. During this period, a lot of the former ruling classes of Korea were in exile in the Soviet Union. This is the time/place where Kim Jong Il was born. After WWII, when Japan got curb stomped by the allied nations, and they busied themselves rebuilding Germany and Japan and the Cold War was heating up - those exiles returned to Korea.

Initially it was founded as a Republic, but after a series of failed elections that all saw heavy allegations of fraud and corruption - a growing socialist party tried to grab power. The power grab quickly devolved into a civil war, and both sides brought their backers in. North Korea pulled in the Soviet Union and the recently formed People's Republic of China while South Korea drew aid from NATO and the US. Enter the Korean War and every episode of MASH that you may/may not remember. The Korean War was most noteworthy on a global scale as the first significant armed conflict in the Cold War.

It was also known as the funniest of all 21st century wars due to the wide-spread deployment of wise-cracking doctors...
The war never officially ended, but an armistice was reached on July 1953, with a DMZ established at the current battle-line of the 38th parallel. After lengthy negotiations the world lost interest and Korea rested in the relative obscurity of the World's eye.

Fast forward to the fall of the Soviet Union; With the Soviets down North Korea lost one of its major backers, and its economy turned to shit. Progressively Kim Jong Il, who had recently inherited power from his father, started getting even more crazy and ruthless (an accomplishment for any dictator). With the continued boldness of North Korea and their desire to be viewed as a world power, they started to lost support from their last major supporter, China, who is also turned off by their constant and shady attempts to develop nuclear weapons.

He is the reason I have a standing policy never to trust shirtless Asian people (except Bruce Lee)

Developing nukes and their constant funding of extremist organizations has seen them under constant scrutiny by the UN and getting slapped on the wrist with numerous economic sanctions and angry letters.

In recent news - on 26 Mar a South Korean corvette (The Cheonan) sunk along the NLL (Northern Limit Line), the northernmost naval boundary between the Koreas and a site of numerous clashes since it was established after the armistice. At first North Korea stayed quiet and all officials were really reluctant to name any cause. A week after the Cheonan sank, it was found that the ship was conclusively sunk by an external explosion, and North Korea started making denials. When the international team of investigators found remains of a North-Korean produced torpedo amongst the wreckage, South Korea was pissed and demanded an apology from the North. North Korea told South Korea to go fuck itself, and in response North Korea cut off economic ties (this was Mondayish)

South Korea is responsible for a HUGE portion of North Korea's income, so this doesn't make the North happy. In response after a day or two they cut off all diplomatic relations with South Korea and expel all South Korean citizens (an action normally reserved for when a country is RIGHT about to go to war).

Now we are in a stand off where China is trying to calm the two down, not wanting to see a fire-fight on their front door. Russia doesn't seem to care and hasn't said much of shit. Japan and the US are like 'Fuck you, North Korea chill out and say you are sorry". With our mutual defense treaty saying that if the two Koreas throw down, we have to jump in to back the South up.

So that's where we are now. While the Obama administration is adamant about trying to defuse the situation, they still make it known that they condemn the attack. They also sent Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to talk to all the regional heads-of-state for a 'diplomatic' solution. Personally I think this is just to piss off all the countries involved because if I had a lot of shit going on and I had to go and talk to Hillary I would be pretty offended and pissed off. Maybe Obama is also hoping she gets assassinated and the US gets a two-fer out of the deal. Hillary Clinton gets off AND Kim Jong Il gets the piss bombed out of his crazy ass.

Sending this lady to talk to you is like the international way of putting a flaming bag of dog poop at your front door (in my personal opinion)

Friending your boss

Haven’t had too much to write about lately: partly due to a lack of inspiration and partly due to the bulk of my time outside of dating and work (my “me time”) has been spent on Warhammer & 40K and trying to get stuff squared away and be prepared for the Dark Heresy game I started running two weeks ago. In layman’s terms – my writing time has been shoved to the side in favor of nerding out.

However, some things did strike me this morning as noteworthy and worth scrawling a bit of a rant about. In the ‘that’s interesting’ department there is an article about seals & dolphins used in homeland security drills. However, I don’t want to get on my soap box about that right now for the devaluing of human life that I feel the last part of the article seems to show. In international news It seems investigators have conclusively found evidence of torpedoes being the cause of the sinking of the South Korean Corvette Cheonan back in late March. Also the riots in Thailand keep getting more and more out of hand and it seems just a few poorly handled incidents away from a full-blown civil war. However, I don’t feel like handling anything that serious right now. So instead something that has been popping up more and more lately I thought I would touch on – something a little more domestic and without the likelihood that people will get shot in the head over it.

Some co workers recently complained that their company had started a facebook page, and had started requiring them to ‘friend’ them. This is a phenomenon that seems to be swiftly spreading and has raised some very interesting conversations in how this relates to free speech and social networking sites. I even made an aside comment on it and got one of the longest and most impassioned series of comment replies I have so far seen on Facebook. (Please note – I didn’t get consent to post this, so all parties have been given cunning cover-names and pictures, everything else has been left in there for purposes of leaving the full context of the conversation.)

There are plenty of articles out there too. Some covering the implications from a privacy rights stand point and how it affects the social dynamic at work (New York Times). Others take a look at it from the perspective of employers and the liabilities it can create (Hubpages). I found more then a few that tackled it from a managerial stand point – most giving mixed results of why its good/bad (MonsterThinking)

To avoid going on a bit of a rant that re iterates a lot of the aforementioned articles cover and continue the beating of a dead horse – I will just throw my two cents out there and just leave this issue be.

I’ve been rolling it over in my head – and while the arguments in favor of an employer coercing employees to join groups or ‘friend’ them have their points: I feel it is in violation of the privacy rights of those employees. More importantly, I think it is contrary to the goal of what Facebook as a “Social-networking utility” is trying to become.

In a mission-statement I found for Facebook - "Facebook's mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected." (Found in an article on the Observer)

So far this seems to have primarily taken the form of people tagging one another in drunken photos. However, it has also shown great potential in connecting people through common concerns worldwide and locally. It also allows people to stay in touch with old friends or family that they otherwise may have completely lost track of, or even forgot about. Quite a few people I knew or were close to in my not-that-long past I have been able to find and reconnect from the opposite side of the globe in some cases.

The part that I keep coming back to is the last part of the mission statement “…make the world more open and connected.” Having your boss peaking over your shoulder as one more needless precaution in our overly nanny-ified society is just one more step back from that. While many postings may seem trite in the grand scheme of things (IE – “Can’t wait till Friday”, “Hate it when the barista gets my coffee wrong”, “Chem class today sucked, FML”, “Will someone plz water my plants in Farmville!!!!?????) without this thought-fodder fertilizing the soil of facebook, the truly prolific will be less likely to grow. If people are constantly afraid they might lose their jobs over one poorly worded post, or are having to wonder what ‘Big Brother’ thinks of what they have to say, they may not say something when they have something truly interesting to say.

All that is the complete opposite of keeping people open and connected…

Link to the Weekend #4

Another attempt to alleviate the suffering of others in my normal saint-like fashion, by providing some stuff to kill the last dwindling hours of work with on Friday. I would like to suggest trying to rig a mirror to your monitor to keep watch for bosses or other authority figures. Alt+Tab lets you jump between windows quickly and without reaching for the mouse. Or you can take a screen capture of a bunch of windows of work stuff like I do, set it as your desktop wallpaper, and then Windows+D will jump right to the desktop. BAM! A wad of Excel spreadsheets and Powerpoints to provide real-world CCD for your lack motivation before the weekend.

As I currently have wood for the new Clash of the Titans movie, I got a big kick out of this.

Large Hadron Collidor April Fools – My favorite for this past 1Apr, I wonder if it occurred to the time traveler to take out the tracking tooth these use to warp him back?

Hooker Xing – This one needs no explanation. Though it does warrant an account of the mental image it evokes. Something of a drive at night and a hooker bolting out in front of your car. Her wide eyes reflecting light just like a deer’s. You try to swerve and get out of the way, but you hit her anyway. Adrenaline surges and you jump out of the car proclaiming “Oh my God! Oh my God! She just ran out in front of me!” as most people do when they feel guilty about road kill. No worries though, its not really killing: ‘cause they died inside a long time ago. I think this description is actually longer then the article its linked too. Huh.

Mocktopus – I just found his stuff yesterday, the comic at the top turned me on to it.

Two Lists from Wired.com caught my eye – One more sci-fi in general with the other just generic video game nerdage. Warning! The second contains some game spoilers for some and painful memories for others! List #1 List #2

Also from Wired – Some cool stuff on bats

As part of my job, I have to keep up on a lot of World News, here are a couple articles that caught my interest – Jihadi MTV & South Korean ship sunk

A look at the grim darkness of the far future for burritos…Mmmm…plasma-cooked.

Re-imagining flicks of the future

The conversation that actually sparked part of the rant previous, which I now think may need to be a little revised/reworked. In retrospect its weaker then I would like. We'll see. But for now: here is part of the e-mail conversation between myself and a good friend considering this trend

D - Do you think this craze about 'reimaginings' of previous work will soon start spilling over into books and history?

Will there soon be a Re-imagined book of Socrates writings where he's a hard-as-nails veteran trying to re-align his ethical compass by killing a mess of ninja who raped and killed his family?

Will Moby Dick be 'reimagined' so it’s about a great space-whale and Captain Ahab needs to capture it without going under 50 light years per hour or the Stellar Pequod will explode, and Ishmael has to make the hard choice to help or hinder the Captain.

Perhaps Nietszche's "Ubermensch" will feature him training to be some kind of genetically-enhanced super human to the rhythms of Kanye West's cover of Daft Punk's 'Bigger, Stronger, Faster, Harder"

Personally, I can't wait till they 're-imagine' WWII: When the telepathic alien brain-bug named Hitler invades the planet Poland and the Space Marines are sent in. It can feature a covert double-agent deep behind Space-Nazi lines named Anne Frank.

S - Hahahaha, If I were a publisher I would leap on those book ideas like a beast! And then gently have my way with them.


A Christmas Carol: After the Armageddon. The cold winter wind blew bitterly outside the slavers office, it had been 15 years since the last summer, the summer when fire rained from the skies and the death knell of so many was the screech of ICBMs and the grinding boots of marching soldiers. "Hello Mr. Scrooge." The man who greeted Scrooge was followed in by the chill of nuclear winter, however, this was not the most unsettling thing about Bob Cratchet's entrance. He had caught the Blight and was now a husk of his former self (which was not much even in the before days), and his left arm was constantly seething beneath his clothing; thanks to the boils which waxed and waned under his ash covered rags. "Shut the door Cratchet, you're late and the slaves are restless, hurry up and give them a touch of your truncheon!"

D - I love it! Post-nuclear apocalypse Christmas Carol. I think it could also use a touch of Jules-Verne-esque Steampunk. Maybe one of the spirits haunting Scrooge (By which I mean assassins sent by the secret charity organization SPIRIT) can be in a suit of steam-powered armor.

Maybe I'll write a work combining my love of Huck Finn and grim fantasy and 're-imagine' the story as one about Huck trying to seek out redemption for his years as a demonologist along with his black-hearted voodoo comrade Papa N----- Jim.

S – Ha ha, Wuthering heights as a solitary hide-out on the British isles following the release of the Rage Virus

A Tale of Two Cities as a story about two robot cities with giant metal legs for locomotion which meet at dusk everyday to do robot-city battle.

D - Lord of the Flies where the children are trapped on an isle and hunted by a terrible wild boar-man.

'If Androids Dream, Do They Dream of Electric Sheep' Done as a Japanese Anime where Deckard is a twelve year old kid who collects cards that turn into giant robots which he pilots into battle against feral 'replicant' cards which have taken human form and infiltrated humanity. Roy Batty is no longer a replicant, but a rival Blade Runner who you find out at the end IS a replicant.

That last one makes me want to cry. I'm sorry for saying it.

Lolita will take out that edgy pederast kind of stuff and make it more of a romantic comedy.

Of Mice & Men is going to be re-imagined as a comedy about the bumbling tales of two kind-hearted, but retarded, drifters.

S - AWESOME! Sign me up for that future screenplay!

(It is here that for a time the conversation degraded into one about blow jobs, Hollywood’s hiring policies, and video games)

All franchises need to pull a Kurt Cobain…

Not in a ‘need to get super depressed at the exploitation of their IP and take a shotgun to the mouth’. That would be callous to those who legitimately decide to coat the wall with a fresh layer of cherry pie. I mean the ending-it-so-people-will-remember-you-at-your-creative-zenith kind of way. Stop things at their peak so people remember that and wonder at what directions you would have taken, rather than watch the franchise stretch it out and grow old, fat, wheezy, and star in its own VH1 special thirty years later.

I was initially thinking of this in the vein of books, but while digging for examples movies presented themselves as far more fitting examples (or targets, as I see them). Case in point: any of the Lethal Weapon series after the second, All the Die Hard movies after the first, and Saws III-VI. I am also lumping in all those “reimagingings” or attempts to revive IPs from my youth but in the form of summer blockbusters (Transformers II and GI Joe as the most recent examples). Let them stay in the golden light of nostalgia and times past, don’t try to repaint and package them and shove them out into studio environment where someone like Michael Bay can rape them like pedophile to a group of unsupervised minors.

As far as literary examples of this phenomena - I am more looking at when an author doesn’t end his work in a timely manner and blathers on so long that the story grows stale and dies (Robert Jordan) or when an author kicks the bucket and his progeny need some quick cash, so they root through the waste bin of their fathers/mothers and dig up their rejects to be published (Frank Herbert’s bastard).

In the case of Robert Jordan (May he rest in peace), I began reading his Wheel of Time series with exuberant wonder. It was a fresh, different world that was engrossing with its history and characters. However, as the series went on, it started becoming repetitive and boring…nothing was happening. Eventually, by the fifth book I realized ‘JESUS WE AREN’T EVEN HALFWAY DONE?!’ and promptly quit the series. Now I have recently found out by someone who kept up with the series that his ‘last book’ the one being published posthumously that Jordan promised would be in only one volume “Even if it has to be 750pages” is being printed in three volumes. The first one is easily 750 pages. What the fuck. The publishers aren’t fooling anyone, three volumes of one book published in three separate books is…three books.

I loved the original Dune, and it’s hard not to acknowledge it as one of the classics of Sci Fi literature, up there with Robert E Heinlein’s Starship Trooper and almost anything Isaac Asimov or Philip K Dick published. However, he should have left it at that. I should have left it at that. I knew there were more books, and none could possibly be as good as the first. And what did I get? Some relief in Dune Messiah and Children of Dune, they were alright. Then what happened? I got a face full of giant purple space worm. That’s when I quit. While suspension of disbelief is necessary when reading or watching fiction, there is only so far it can be taken (or abused in some cases) before it breaks the fourth wall and the shows over.

There are exceptions to this rule. The redux of some new movies and TV shows have been very good, and there are some books that just couldn’t be done their justice if limited to only three-four novels. That last Star Trek movie and the Battlestar Galactica series stand in mind as movie examples. George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones series is still going strong, and if cut short or limited would have been a great mistake.

There is a reason that this is a recent phenomenon. I think people in ages past had a little more sense than dragging out a good thing. What if there had been a Moby Dick II? Perhaps Mark Twain could have written a whole series of Huck Finn books where his friend Jim could spout with increasing frequency “I’m getting too old for this shit!!” I’m thinking there should have been a spinoff of the Divine Comedy where Virgil comes to earth and gets a tour all ‘Fear and Loathing’ style. I want to hear the descriptions of giant bats and machete-wielding Samoans written in Cantos.

So in summary. If you have a really awesome thing going on creatively, resist the urge to ride it out, find a good point and STOP. If necessary take a page from John Bonham’s play book and drink yourself to death while still part of Zeppelin.