This is me lately

Minus the caffeine pill addiction, but it’s how I feel way more often than naught.

I have a lot of things that I feel I need to do: edit down nearly 2,000 pictures from Europe and Korea.  Write about experiences in Korea.  Build a prop.  Take care of household chores, like replacing the kitchen light and paring down the shrubs.  Write some more, about random, inane things for a brog that’s been down since fucking April, that nobody will see until I migrate my site.  Clean my house, so that I can someday sell my house.  I need a haircut.

So what do I do?  Write about how I feel like I don’t have enough time, or any time, instead.

In my defense, I am currently not in a place where I can do much of my self-imposed workload, although I could write about Korea but I was there for two weeks how can i parse it all down to a few words???

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Love it but hate it

Impetus: Nintendo reveals Switch, the gaming console that allows you to play games handheld as well as on television

The technology behind this is truly game breaking.  I’m very much in awe at Nintendo’s ambitions and forward thinking when it comes to the gaming industry.  Microsoft and Sony aren’t even remotely in the same stratosphere when it comes to competing with Nintendo visions, because they’re too busy fighting each other, churning out products that require a hundred updates a week with a video game occasionally playable.

I’d love to read or hear about the creative concepting behind Switch; and the moments when they realized that it wasn’t impossible to feasibly create something that could be played on televisions as well as through handheld capacity.  On top of that, it’s designed to be a very social gaming system, that allows for lots of multiplayers, as long as controllers are available.  It probably was something really inspirational to be a part of.

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When will I learn

That my time is occasionally more important than many things?  Like an ill-informed opportunity to meet Ron Swanson.

Earlier in the week, I saw plug on a local website for An Evening With Nick Offerman, I guess a touring appearance circuit in order to push Nick Offerman’s newest woodworking book Good Clean Fun: Misadventures in Sawdust at Offerman Woodshop.  I thought to myself, this is something that intrigues me, getting to see and meet Ron Swanson.  I hadn’t learned about this event until after it had passed, like most other cool occurrences throughout the city, and being held at Georgia Tech, it wasn’t in an inconvenient location. 

However, I have a lot of things that I need to do, and some things actually have a short window in which I need to complete them.  But as a diehard Parks and Rec fan, especially of Ron Swanson, it seemed like an opportunity that I shouldn’t let pass.

I decided to go.

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Korea Stories: Random Observations

The following is more or less going to be a list of random observations I made while in Korea that didn’t really fit into the mold of any one chunk of posts.  That being said, it’s also indicative that I’m pretty much at the end of the rope when it comes to writing about my experiences in Korea.

Internet is as good as you’ve probably heard: When you use the internet in Korea, coming back to America and using my Comcast “high-speed” service that I pay a premium penny for on a monthly basis feels like going from a jet to a Ford Festiva.  Wi-fi, at a public hotel, with many users concurrently connected, was still pulling 60 down and 60 up, speeds that rival my own private connection, hard-wired.  And it was like that everywhere I went; I know, because out of curiosity, I was running the SpeedTest app just to see how good Korean internet speeds were.

Cabs are dirt cheap.  I was often doing math in my head while in Korea in regards to trying to find the USD equivalent of everything I was spending.  It’s easiest to round up or down, to where it’s a 1 to 1,000 when converting a dollar to Korean Won, so basically chopping off the last three digits was the easiest to rationalize the dollar amount of things.  I rode in a lot of cabs, because after the amount I was walking, sometimes I just didn’t want to hoof it for more miles to get to the nearest train station.  But whereas in the States, a cab ride for just a few blocks easily ticks its way to $10 and up, I was baffled to see how often times a cab ride for a considerable distance, often started at roughly $3, and only once did I spend more than $10 on a cab ride, and that was a good distance.

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Photos: Korea Trip 2016, batch 4

[2020 note] These are unposted photos from 2016, the fourth of four galleries of my first-ever trip to the Motherland, that I took with my mother.

The tour group concluded with a trip to Seoraksan (Mount Seorak) before it was back to Seoul, where my mom and I settled into another AirBnB for the last few days of our trip.

Admittedly, as much as I loved my time in Seoul, I really was feeling like I had begun to see a lot of the city and having done countless hours wandering and seeing shopping center after shopping center, I was ready to go home.

Hilariously, my mom reached out to some other old friends in the area, and extended her own stay for another two weeks, but I was most definitely ready to head back to the states.  It was an unforgettable first-time in Korea, and I have nothing but great memories and appreciation for seeing my culture in its native land.

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Photos: Korea Trip 2016, batch 3

[2020 note] These are unposted photos from 2016, the third of four galleries of my first-ever trip to the Motherland, that I took with my mother.

After a few more days on Jeju Island, the tour brought us back to the mainland where I thought we would just go back to Seoul, but instead we landed in Busan, where we would begin a road trip up the Korean peninsula visiting various towns and cities on the way.

After capitalizing in Busan, finding the League of Legends pop-up store, I caught up with the rest of the tour group and from there it was Geongju, Pohang and Pyeongchang, seeing all sorts of sights from seas of country, to even a brief stop inside a cavern.

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Korea Stories: League of Legends

If you haven’t noticed, I’m kind of in to League of Legends.

And as much as I’m typically opposed to doing stuff like playing the same game I could play back at home, there was a part of me that was really curious to find out what League would be like in Korea, the region of the world in which the talent is undisputedly the greatest and where the competitive scene is respected and regarded as a legitimate, money-making spectator sport.

I wanted to try playing League of Legends on the Korean server and see what the differences were.  And surely, in the part of the world where League is so highly regarded, I should be able to find some cool League merch, or some professional League gaming team swag, right?

It started out pretty amusingly, when I got to Korea.  Through international roaming, my phone piggybacked onto whatever provider would allow it, and in the case of being in Korea, my phone immediately latched onto an SK Telecom signal.  Now this might seem like no big deal to the vast majority of people, since SK is one of South Korea’s corporate giants that have their fingers in just about every possible business venture from petroleum to telecommunications, but to a League fan, SK is primarily known as the company that owns SKT T1, basically the Chicago Bulls or New York Yankees of the League competitive scene.  SKT has won two of the five world championships (and Korea didn’t play at all in year 1) and are in position to compete for a third, but they are undoubtedly the most prominent team in the entire world, when it comes to League.

Yeah, just connecting to SK Telecom cellular service elicits that much of a response.

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