2012-11-17 – CAVEAT DVMPTRVCK

Best hyperbole ever!
"tla alahui, tla petzcahui in tlalticpac" - Nahuatl proverb
He aquí los pensamientos aleatorios de un epistemólogo andante.
"Is it getting solipsistic in here, or is it just me?"
"The immediate task of philosophy is to unmask human self-alienation in its unholy shape." - Karl Marx
"i" before "e" except after "c" - disproved by science!
"Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo." - Don Marquis
"[M]etaphysics is no different from table manners, in that there are all sorts of ways to set the table, all of which will look “wrong” from the outside, but all of which work just as well as any other for those who adopt them?"
- Justin Smith-Ruiu
"A blog is the height of ego and narcissism, rivaled only by the act of procreation, or the wearing of a man-bun." - Jamie Wahls
"Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days." - Flannery O’Connor
"Down through the centuries, the notion that life is wrapped in a dream has been a pervasive theme of philosophers and poets. So doesn't it make sense that death, too, would be wrapped in dream? That, after death, your conscious life would continue in what might be called "a dream body"? It would be the same dream body you experience in your everyday dream life. Except that in the post-mortal state, you could never again wake up, never again return to your physical body." - spoken by a character in the excellent movie Waking Life (2001).
"The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane." - Marcus Aurelius
"If I had a dollar for every time I got distracted, I wish I had some ice cream."
Sometimes setting yourself on fire sheds light on the situation.
"Tenho o dever de me fechar em casa no meu espírito e trabalhar quanto possa e em tudo quanto possa, para o progresso da civilização e o alargamento da consciência da humanidade." - Fernando Pessoa
피할수 없는 고통이라면 차라리 즐겨라
As of June, 2013, I have assumed a new identity: I am a cancer survivor. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
This world, for aught he knows, is very faulty and imperfect, compared to a superior standard; and was only the first rude essay of some infant deity, who afterwards abandoned it, ashamed of his lame performance: it is the work only of some dependent, inferior deity; and is the object of derision to his superiors: it is the production of old age and dotage in some superannuated deity; and ever since his death, has run on at adventures, from the first impulse and active force which it received from him.
- David Hume, in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, 1779
A blog, in the end, is really not so different from an inscription on a bone: I was here, it declares to no one in particular. Don't forget that.
- Justin Smith-Ruiu
재미없으면 보상해드립니다!
All things are enchained with one another, bound together by love.
- Nietzsche [really!]
Leviticus 19:33-34
Business is a good game - lots of competition and minimum of rules. You keep score with money.
- Nolan Bushnell
What if we're not conscious, we just think we are?
Donc, si Dieu existait, il n’y aurait pour lui qu’un seul moyen de servir la liberté humaine, ce serait de cesser d’exister.
- Mikhail Bakunin
Solvitur ambulando.
Only thoughts reached by walking have value.
- Friedrich Nietzsche
Los Angeles is to America what America is to the world.
- someone on the internet
Art is not a projection of self, it is an utterly alternate self.
Loneliness. Did ya know that loneliness will kill you deader than a .357 Magnum? Did ya know that?
- Andrew Sims (Rapper)
"When I was a stranger you gave me razor wire and pushed me in the river." - Matthew 25:35
Sometimes I wonder why I even bother to soliloquize. Where was I?
- the villain Heinz Doofenshmirtz, in the cartoon Phineas and Ferb.
Is seer periculeus voor de onbekende, om aan te doen.
- Hendrick Hamel
Liberty and justice for all
Offer not available in some areas
Prices subject to change
- internet meme
I will buy a 32 foot ladder at home depot, and I will make America pay for it.
- a Mexican
Psalms 51:17
Do unto others 20% better than you would expect them to do unto you, to correct for subjective error.
- Linus Pauling
I dream of a world where chickens can cross the road without having their motives questioned.
여유있는 태도를 잃어서는 안 된다
Blogging online since 1965

My name is Jared Way. I was born in rural Far Northern California, and became an "adoptive" Minnesotan. I have lived in many other places: Mexico City, Philadelphia, Valdivia (Chile), Los Angeles. And for 11 years, I was an expatriate living in South Korea. In the summer of 2018, I made another huge change, and relocated to Southeast Alaska, which is my uncle's home.
I have a background in Linguistics and Spanish Literature. Two decades ago, I was a database programmer. Last decade, in Korea, I worked as an EFL (English as a Foreign Language) teacher. Currently I'm a ne'er-do-well retail clerk and freelance website administrator living amid the Alaskan rainforest.
In June, 2013, while I was in Ilsan in South Korea, I was diagnosed with cancer, and underwent successful treatment. That changed my life pretty radically.
Currently, you could say I'm "between jobs," somewhat caretaking my uncle (to the extent he tolerates that) and getting adapted to life in rural Alaska after so many years as an urban dweller.
These bloggings, then, have been my random jottings on the subject of my mostly pleasant life among the Quasi-Confucian Cyber-Industrial Paleolithic Peninsulites of Lower Far Siberia, and my more recent time spent on the Free-range Insane Asylum known as Southeast Alaska.
I started this blog before I even had the idea of going to Korea (first entry: Caveat: And lo...). So this is not meant to be a blog about Korea, by any stretch of the imagination. Life in Korea, and Korean language and culture, inevitably played a central role in this blog's incarnation for many years, and life in the rural, temperate rainforest plays an important role these days.
Basically, this blog is a newsletter for the voices in my head. It keeps everyone on the same page: it has become a sort of aide-mémoire.
For a more detailed reflection on why I'm blogging, you can look at this old post: What this blog is, and isn't.
If you're curious about me, there is a great deal of me here. I believe in what I call "opaque transparency" - you can learn almost everything about me if you want, but it's not immediately easy to find.
A distillation of my personal philosophy (at least on good days):
I have made the realization that happiness is not a mental state. It is not something that is given to you, or that you find, or that you can lose, or that can be taken from you. Happiness is something that you do. And like most things that you do, it is volitional. You can choose to do happiness, or not. You have complete freedom with respect to the matter.
"Ethical joy is the correlate of speculative affirmation." - Gilles Deleuze (writing about Spinoza).

Bob Gehrenbeck on Caveat: Poem #2631 “Ellipsis”
Bob Gehrenbeck on Caveat: Poem #2633 “The circle of the seasons”
Andrew on Caveat: Tree #1711 “Behind the mushroom”
Bob Gehrenbeck on Caveat: Poem #2601 “The sky’s arena”
Bob Gehrenbeck on Caveat: Poem #2549 “The limbs of verisimilitude”

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Caveat: Commerce

So. After more than five years in Korea, I did something new today: I used an entirely Korean website to purchase something using my cellphone account. I suspect I'm a bit behind the curve on this. The reason I'm behind the curve has to do with my being one of those personalities that actually reads the fine print on online purchase agreements, combined infelicitously with the fact that there's a hell of a lot of fine print associated with making purchases online in Korea – in Korean, of course, about which I have some degree of perfectionistic anxiety.

So to do this online commerce thing, I have to break through some barriers. First, I have to just relax and keep hitting the "확인" [hwagin = continue] and "동의" [dongui = agree] buttons obliviously. Second, I have to use Microsoft's Internet Explorer (Korean e-commerce is still hogtied by some very old regulations that keep it stuck in an unhappy marriage with ActiveX – 15 years ago they were very forward-looking and progressive and enabled Korea to bootstrap its current internet success story, but now they are quite annoying). Third, I have to have something I really want to buy.

This last barrier was surmounted because I've been listening to more and more Korean music and feeling less and less comforatble with my piratical ways. For my non-Korean music, I've been using Amazon's mp3 store, which now works from Korea (it didn't used to) – my account is tied to my US credit card. But for Korean music, Amazon is ill-stocked. And I've been put off by the lack of finding a comfortable English-option website whereat to download music legally, for pay. They simply don't exist, in my experience. You've got to break down and pretend to be a Korean. Download it using IE, using "phone cash" from your cellphone account.

So that's what I did. And now I'm the proud owner of an mp3 track that cost me… lemme see… about 138 won, including taxes. That's 13 cents. 대박 [daebak ~= kewl].

What I'm listening to right now.

케이윌 [keiwil] (K.will), "이러지마 제발"[ireojima jebal] (Please don't…).

The video, by the way, is… interesting. It all goes along swimmingly, entirely compliant to K-pop cultural norms, until the last moment, when… er… what's going on there? Any thoughts, anyone? Is Korean pop taking a first step out of the closet? Or would that be an overdetermined reading for what is, essentially, intended to be a bromance?

Caveat: 기지도 못하면서 뛰려고 한다

2012-11-17, 15:16 2023-03-22 Banalities & Journaling / 한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean) / 한국어 속담 (Aphorisms & Proverbs)

기지도 못하면서 뛰려고한다
crawl-PRENEG-TOO cannot-do-IF run-TRY-PRES
[Someone] tries to run if [he/she] cannot crawl first.

“Trying to run before you can walk.” Or, maybe, this is kind of like the proverbial “Putting the cart before the horse.” This seems to happen a lot in Korea. They need to remember this proverb when running a business. Just a thought.
I slept badly last night. Good thing today is Sunday. I plan to be very lazy today – I have substantial skills in this area.

Caveat: Love Never Ends

2012-11-17, 05:47 2023-03-22 Background Noise / Banalities & Journaling / Less Banal Than Usual / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc) / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism

I sat and watched a 4 hour movie basically straight through, this evening. I’m a little bit hesitant to recommend this movie in this venue – it was most definitely NSFW, if you catch my drift.

But it was epic, and fascinating. It was half Cervantes, half William S. Burroughs, and executed like a live-action anime cartoon. If you can stomach strong sexual content (perversions!), vast amounts of blood and gore (homage to Kill Bill), insults to religion and capitalism galore, Lacanian psychosexual philosophizing and sadomasochistic parenting … well, then… if you can stomach those things, then I heartily recommend: Love Exposure (愛のむきだし [ai no mukidashi]).

It was really about 4 or 5 different movies. I would have been interested to watch any of them, though for different reasons. It’s not a a very optimistic view of human nature, frankly, despite the “love-triumphs” ending. The significant quote that runs thematically through movie is 1 Corinthians 13:

If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.

But don’t misunderstand – it’s not at all clear that the message is “pro-Christian.” Or even pro-Love. I didn’t come away with that impression. And, as a product of 99% non-Christian Japan, that’s understandable. It’s messing with the symbolism, as a lot of Japanese pop culture does, but without any deference or loyalty or, for that matter, sincerity. But just because a movie is contrived and insincere doesn’t mean it can’t be a great work of art. It’s horribly contrived, and complicatedly switches between a kind of plausible emotional realism and a two-dimensional, adolescent, comic-book view of the world. Certainly, it is the case that Love Never Ends, if by love, you mean “lust” and by never ends you mean rape and bloody murder. For all that, the Corinthians quote is nevertheless perfect.

So much for trying to review it.

I liked the soundtrack, too.

What I’m listening to right now.

[UPDATE 2018-01-23: The old youtube video has disappeared from the internet. Probably gobbled up by the copyright police. But I like the song. So I found a “cover” of the song by another artist. That’s the current video embedded.]

ゆらゆら帝国 [Yurayurateikoku], “空洞です” [kūdōdesu = Hollow Me].
The lyrics:

ぼくの心をあなたは奪い去った
Boku no kokoro o anata wa ubai satta
俺は空洞　でかい空洞
Ore wa kūdō dekai kūdō
全て残らずあなたは奪い去った
Subete nokorazu anata wa ubai satta
俺は空洞　面白い
Ore wa kūdō omoshiroi
バカな子どもが　ふざけて駆け抜ける
Bakana kodomo ga fuzakete kakenukeru
は空洞　でかい空洞
Ore wa kūdō dekai kūdō
いいよ　くぐりぬけてみな　穴の中
Ī yo kugurinukete mina ana no naka
どうぞ　空洞
Dōzo kūdō

なぜか町には大事なものがない
Naze ka machi ni wa daijina mono ga nai
それはムード　甘いムード
Sore wa mūdo amai mūdo
意味を求めて無意味なものがない
Irikunda roji de anata ni deaitai
それはムード　とろけそうな
Sore wa mūdo toroke-sō na
入り組んだ路地であなたに出会いたい
Irikunda roji de anata ni deaitai
それはムード　甘いムード
Sore wa mūdo amai mūdo
誰か　味見をしてみな　踊りたい
Dare ka ajimi o shite mina odoritai
さあどうぞ　ムード
Sā dōzo mūdo

ぼくの心をあなたは奪い去った
Boku no kokoro o anata wa ubai satta
俺は空洞　でかい空洞
Ore wa kūdō dekai kūdō
全て残らずあなたは奪い去った
Subete nokorazu anata wa ubai satta
俺は空洞　面白い
Ore wa kūdō omoshiroi
バカな子どもが　ふざけて駆け抜ける
Bakana kodomo ga fuzakete kakenukeru
俺は空洞　でかい空洞
Ore wa kūdō dekai kūdō
いいよ　くぐりぬけてみな　穴の中
Ī yo kugurinukete mina ana no naka
さあどうぞ　空洞
Sā dōzo kūdō
空洞
Kūdō
空洞
Kūdō
空洞
Kūdō
空洞
Kūdō