Scribblings of the Metropolitician

I Have 50 Tix to the Transformers! [UPDATE]

UPDATE: Late dinner at 9 (details at ZenKimchi, but reply here), we'll be in the lobby of the Yongsan theater at 10:45, and I am returning any extra tix at 11:00. Movie's at 11:30 and they must be refunded 30 minutes before the show.

So if you wanna go to this, but just show up, you got a window of between 10:45 and 11:00 to just come. But it's best if you sign up here. We might have 20 or so tickets unspoken for, or we might not, since the Fulbright ETA dinner is tonight and this little shindig will be announced there, there are a lot of them, they've spent their year in the countryside, and there are a LOT of them.

Anyway, if you sign up here, you're guaranteed a spot until 6 PM, from which time I won't have guaranteed access to the Internet.

Refer to the other signup post on this matter to sign up to go.

Don't Get Drunk on Amtrak! (Or Be Diabetic!)

Wow. Don't know why I keep coming across these travel nightmares, but I think it's kinda funny that I do, so I'm not gonna break the streak. From Phoenix's News at 5 (with video on the page):

PHOENIX -- A 65-year-old St. Louis man is missing after Amtrak personnel, mistaking his diabetic shock for drunk and disorderly behavior, kicked him off a train in the middle of a national forest, according to police in Williams, Ariz.

Whoa. The family disputes this and people say he hadn't drunk anything.

Police said there is no train station or running water at the crossing, which is about two miles from the nearest road, at an elevation of about 8,000 feet.



Amtrak personnel told police dispatchers that Sims was drunk and unruly.



The Sims family said Sims is diabetic and was going into shock.



Sims' brother, Brian Mason, said his family tried to call Sims on his cell phone that night, but Sims was incoherent.



When officers arrived at the crossing, police said, Sims ran into the woods, leaving his luggage and medication behind.



Cell phone records show that Sims' phone was last used in Litchfield Park, Ariz., 180 miles from Williams.



Williams police told CBS 5 that Amtrak has used the abandoned crossing as a drop-off site in the past. Graham said that whether drunk or not, no one should be dropped off there.



"You don't put anyone off in an area like that," Graham said.

Damn skippy you don't. Luckily, they found him (story and video here), four days later and wandering along the tracks in a daze – frankly, I'm amazed he was alive, and it kind of sounds like everyone else was, too.

Diabetic shock? Put off the train in a national forest, miles away from the nearest source of even running water? And four days without it? I would have been kinda surprised to see a 30-year-old man in generally good health come back from something like that.

I'm glad to see him alive, but you know that family had better sue the Holy Sam Hell out of Amtrak. They say they're "not mad at anyone." Well, they said that while still looking for their brother. Once everything has settled, I think Amtrak needs to be sued to high heaven. Even the po-po said you can't leave people out there like that, even if they are drunk.

Craziness.

Pandora.TV Suck Rizzocks

Sorry, guys -

It's Pandora.TV, which means, "If you're not running Explorer and installing ActiveX from our site or other Korean ones, fuck off."

Yet, here they are on their English site, which is, like most English pages on Korean sites, completely non-functional and an overblown press release that exists to draw in the Fantasy Foreign Investor™ who is supposed to be impressed by all this:

Founded in October 2004, PandoraTV has achieved a monthly unique user base of 15 million and close to 2 billion monthly page views, becoming the leading Internet video site in one of the most wired nations in the world. PandoraTV has pioneered the trend of user-created content (UCC) in the Korean Internet video space, and has been a leader in the so-called Web 2.0 trend.

Sorry, but that is a complete and utter crock of runny shit. At least to anything meaningful for a foreign body. And I love the look of affected glee the girl with the clown makeup has in response to a completely blank screen. A nice touch, Pandora!

I had to view that video through my Windoze running on Parallels on my Mac. Pandora.TV sucks rizzocks because it's so finicky when I try to upload videos, I had to give up in the end. It won't take MP4 files (WTF!?), and when I prepared MOV and MPEG files (which it's supposed to accept), the system was yelling at me about installing some codec, go to some site, adjust this compression ratio wingbat phaser stream whatever, blah, blah, blah.

Oh, and Foreigners Need Not Apply.™ In this day and age, with most major portals accepting foreign ID cards and utilizing other methods of non-pure blood registration, Pandora.TV just says, "Kiss my ass."

Thanks, Pandora.TV, and apologies to my readers. I couldn't find the video anywhere else.

I'll try to find the equivalent videos on MNcast, which is a Korean service that is entirely foreigner friendly (easy registration, easy uploading, easy embedding).

I always say that "Korea should have invented YouTube." Well, with such stellar thinking and planning as evidenced by Pandora.TV, it's doubly a surprise that they didn't.

Pandora.TV = "Koreans only."

Lovely.

Ever Think About Taking a Cruise? Think Again!

Haven't been on one, but had always considered this cheesy option as a possible getaway. Too bad that if you get a raw deal, you're stuck with being on a floating prison for the duration.

Whatever they're like, I certainly won't be going with Royal Caribbean! You gotta read about one experience here from The Consumerist, with closed pools and restaurants, casino shut down, tepid jacuzzis, cold showers, areas under construction, and even rooms with no running water.

Yikes!

Here's an excerpt from the Royal Caribbean people, after receiving this complaint, which started with the boat having been half a day late:

Nevertheless, we offer our sincere apologies that you were not aware of this delay and the goodwill gesture of a $20.00 onboard credit offered to assist with covering any lunch costs incurred while waiting to board the ship.

Was that like the customer service people just playing around, trying to piss him off? $20 for lunch? Seriously, I'd have rather just been denied. That guy spent nearly $4000 on the cruise alone.

Royal Carribean. Evil.

I Apologize for Scarring Your Mind 2

This is pretty funny, but you might also be permanently damaged by playing this "Hot Issue" (popular) Korean UCC.

You watched it? I told you. Don't blame me.

Read more after the jump.

Movie Theater Review: Artreon (Shinchon)

As part of my effort to post a bit more often and diversify my blog's content, I'm gonna do more stuff I've wanted to do, but always consider back burner stuff. But I love movie theaters, obsess over screen and sound quality, and have a lifelong obsession with home theater, starting with me syncing up one track from the soundtrack of Star Trek III: The Search for Spock on my mom's record player to the picture on the screen. Getting the music track into stereo, while the voice came out of the television screen (center speaker, baby!) was a pretty neat little trick, I thought.

My brother and family thought I was crazy. And yes, I was a dork. (Was?) But my friends never complain on movie nights. And I do notice a lot of details when it comes to the moviegoing experience, and now that Korea has come such a long way (it really has) in theater technology, I present my obsession to you, in a form of news you might be able to use.

OK. Before those who point out my alleged negativity – since this is going to be a rip of a review on the Artreon theater in Shinchon – let me just say that there are a lot of theaters I like in Korea, and my personal favorite for a lot of quirky reasons is the Land Cinema at Yongsan. But I want to save the good ones for later.

As for the Artreon, however – yo, this theater sucks rizzocks.

I saw Shrek 3 there recently, and it was the worst movie experience I've had in Korea since watching movies in the 1990's in Cheju Island, before they had assigned seats, and when they took more people than they had chairs (some big blockbusters were standing-room-only, and I saw many a movie standing up!).

Cinema One, which is poorly marked and down on B2 two floors below, was simply put, horrid. Light levels for the screen were weak, as they are in most of the analog screens there, since lazy and cheap theaters that want to scrimp on money will wait until the last possible moment to change the bulbs in the projectors, even if they go below acceptable light levels towards the end of their lives.

Then there was the heat. They was simply skimpin', and skimpin' hard. Cinema One is a big theater, actually, and there were lots of people there. They wouldn't run the air conditioners continually, and it got noticeably hot in there, to the point where I actually saw people squirming a bit and pulling out their theater bills and other pieces of paper and fanning themselves.

Remember when hand fans were as common as cellphones are today? When you'd go to a public venue and see the wig-wag of dozens or even hundreds of people fanning themselves? Well, that day brought back memories, and I think the rest of the audience was a little annoyed at being forced to go down memory lane.

And it wasn't just that the AC units broke or something; they would come on just at the point when you noticed it and were starting to get irritated and starting to sweat, then get switched off just before it got to comfortable again.

Truly distracting, and in a way, ruined the movie experience, because it breaks you out of the film, detracts from the film's ability to enthrall you into a state of verisimilitude. In short, I wanted to get out of the theater as soon as possible, as my companion did, and we were busy waiting for the film to end, more than interested in the film itself. And while the third Shrek installment ain't no masterpiece, it's not half bad, either.

As for the other screens in the Artreon, I remember on three distinct occasions seeing films in the various upper levels in which the picture was noticeably out-of-focus. I'm a theater stickler, but I'm still pretty normal and enjoy most films here without thinking about them, and have only complained to managers maybe twice in my life about anything; yet, the several times when I was tempted to do it in relation to my movie-going experience in Korea were almost all at the Artreon.

And just to give you a sense of how bad it once was, the generally pretty tolerant Korean audiences were even bristling when I saw Man on Fire a while back, since it was as if someone had fallen asleep in the projection room and accidentally hit the wrong button on the way down; I actually got up and told them to fix the focus, which caused the teenager much confusion as to what I was doing talking to her, what I could possibly be complaining about, and hey, wasn't I a foreigner?

Since, as a photographer and a pretty decent Korean speaker, I know the words for "focus" and things, I think I was explaining myself pretty clearly; I think it was more of a case of "I'm 18 and this wasn't in my job description." I think she went to tell someone, since they started fiddling with the focus controls, much to the audible relief of the audience; but in the end, it wasn't much better than at the beginning. I think the fact that they tried (but failed) was enough for the audience, since at least they noticed. I think there's something wrong with that projector.

I did see something there in the upper levels recently, and I did remember thinking that the picture looked very soft; not out-of-focus, but it wasn't sharp, either.

I'd avoid Artreon if you have the choice. I think other Korean moviegoers are, as well, actually. Usually, when the new Megabox Shinchon is sold out all day, you can still get a ticket for a showing at the Artreon. Which, come to think of it, is why I keep ending up there from time to time. Note to self: plan farther ahead.

I like doing these reviews, and will do several good ones; until then, I'll give you a rundown of the theaters that you shouldn't have any problems with:

- Any Megabox is a good bet (they're actually Loew's Theaters, from the States, even down to the logo and opening graphics, which is why I guess they keep things up more). Their shit is together.

- CGV is also a good bet, especially in Yongsan. Their digital projectors (not all of the theaters are digital, you should know, and I'll make a point to ask again) fucking rock, and when I saw Superman in digital Imax in 3D, I thought I was flying. Their shit is majorly together.

- Land Cinema, which was never called "Megabox" but shares both decor and equipment with theaters of that name, has always been a nice, hidden place. Nothing super special about their analog projectors, but their sound is always decent and you've actually got something to do if you're into electronics or playing pool, or whatever. When they have events, they often come up with fun, creative activities related to them, or sometimes randomly have things like board games and other random stuff available to while away the time. I just like the Land.

More later, and I hope this might be marginally useful when you're out there planning to see that next new blockbuster.

Transformers Signup!

[Just to be clear, since I think it was confusing, the date we're seeing this is June 30th!]

The time has come!

The goal: Watch The Transformers in the way that any summer blockbuster with large budgets and dueling robots should be watched: yelling and cheering with real fans!

We're going to be aiming (with ZenKimchi's people, too) to see The Transformers sometime around 9-ish or 10-ish (be flexible, please) on Saturday evening at the CGV Yongsan. If you want a ticket, please drop an email (link at top right corner of this page) with "Transformers" somewhere in the subject line with your full name, phone number, and how many spots you need.

This doesn't have to get complicated, but if there are any questions, I need to be able to contact you. And just to keep things safe, drop a reply in the comments to say you sent an email, in case the email goblins get it. I don't want to miss you.

Recap:

1) Drop an email with name, number, and how many tickets needed in an email.

2) Leave a comment to this post that says you sent an email.

3) Show up on Saturday. I can return tix up to 30 mins before a show, so if I don't see you there or you haven't gotten in touch, I'm gonna take the leftovers and get refunds.

I'm gonna try and buy a block of 30-40, between me and ZenKimchi. If we need more, we can buy more, but we might be in different blocks of seats in the theater. which is OK, since I think there's more strength in being spread out.

Autobots, move roll out!

Marry a North Korean Woman!

I love saying, "I told you so." This just in from The Marmot, and confirming a prediction I made more than a year ago:

Check out the bottom of this post I made at the beginning of last year, when I said:

"North Korean women, however, will be the #1 hot commodity for South Korean men, as the recent disgusting media display of public (male) salivation over "North Korean beauties" and the re-popularization of the old saying of "남남북녀" (southern men for northern girls) indicate. Considering the fact that advertisements for "Marrying Vietnamese Virgins" are a common sight all over any Korean city – because of the ever-present problem of the male-tilted gender disparity caused by pre-natal screening that leads to the increasingly higher rate of abortions of girls as a couple without a son heads towards 2nd, 3rd, and 4th children – who better to marry than someone within "our" own minjok? I wonder which will win out – the dropping birth rate and the increasing expense of raising kids leading to less children overall and increased use of pre-natal screening to exterminate would-be daughters, or the inevitable (and positive) decreasing importance of gender itself in South Korean society. Hopefully the latter factor will grow such as to decrease the power of the former one, but only time will tell. But considering the myriad ways that women's bodies are already commodified as objects of consumption in South Korean society, North Korean women, with their lack of economic and social power, don't have much bright to look forward to in South Korea."

And also:

But mark my words, the Korean notion of "minjok" will be utilized – as it has for a little more than 100 years – to accomplish the goals of the state and the elite that is largely in control of it. Images of reunited families and touching stories will abound on Korean televisions after any big national reunification. But that is, ladies and gentlemen, will be simply the beginning of another sad story, even as it will seem like the ending to one previous. Ideologies of nationalism shift and change with the times, but their utility to the group in power does not. I know many people won't agree, but see if this little chart of social hierarchy doesn't seem like it won't make sense, even before the fact:

– South Korean man
– South Korean woman
– North Korean woman
– North Korean man

Who would you want to be 10 years from now? Who do you think will have the most soci0-economic options? The least? How much will the power of the concept of minjok have once North and South are reunited? Who do you think will have the power to dominate the way North Korean history will be written and taught in the schools if North Korea ceases to exist?

A Phone Under Any Other Name...

...is still a phone, but used to mean that it was a pain in the ass to register or change service, or even buy all the cool models of phones, which never seem to be available as a pre-paid card option.

But I did it.

And now, after having done it, I see that things have changed.

I got a new phone, baby!

I finally took the afternoon off to do what I thought would be the distressingly difficult task of changing my cellphone and registering it to my own name.

Well, it was distressingly difficult, but only because my phone number still belonged to Fulbright and was part of a block of names registered under a corporate account and there needed to be confirmations, red official stamps, and calls to both SK and KTF to disentangle myself from Fulbright's registration with KTF and move it over to KTF.

See, the registering the phone in my name part, though – that's easy now. I've known for years that it was officially possible and that there were forms to fill out, but I also knew that most neighborhood phone stores either A) didn't know the process nor had the special forms, nor B) particularly wanted to do it, so always simply said, "No! It's not possible." When in fact, it was.

Now, that issue's officially dead.

FOREIGNERS CAN NOW EASILY OFFICIALLY REGISTER A PHONE UNDER THEIR OWN NAMES WITHOUT ANY SPECIAL FORMS, CO-SIGNERS, OR OTHE BULLSHIT. AT LEAST WITH SK.

I had gone to SK's web page and printed up the policy that affected foreigners, ready to dig my heels into the dirt and get that phone registered by force, but he actually had the same sheet under a piece of glass on his desk:

You can blow it up REAL big to read the details by clicking on the picture. In short, though, SK has implemented what I'd been yelling about for years – if it's true that the reason foreigners weren't allowed to register cellphones in their own names because too many of them skipped the country without paying their last bills, then why not simply make us foreign bail jumper types pay a deposit? I always thought that would be fair – something like a couple hundred bucks, which would start being depleted after you were perhaps a couple months late with the bills. Then, when it runs down, the company cuts it off.

Well, that's pretty much what SK did, praise the Lord. So, the standard deposit is 200,000 won, but varies according to visa status. See up there, where the middle column is, that affects most work and other visas many foreigners are on? E-2 and F-1 are part of that group. You pay 200,000 won for deposit.

But to my surprise (and delight to my wallet), since I'm now on an F-4, I don't pay anything. Also, if you've got an F-2 (from marrying a Korean citizen), you're off the hook, too! No deposit! Now this is one time when being a halfsie actually has a concrete benefit! Guess all that mixing of Korean blood means we're more reliable or something. The people who really need it though, are the A-class people, and the diplomatic visas: since they don't get issued a foreigner's registration card, they really could use the break – they don't have to pay a deposit, either.

Anyway, I think it's fair to pay a deposit, and it's about damn time – denying the ability to get a cellphone when you can open a bank account, rent an apartment, or get a driver's license at the drop of a hat in Korea didn't seem to make much sense.

I don't know if KTF is still requiring a Korean credit card (which is basically the most ludicrous discriminatory hoop to be made to jump and the reason I've been mooching under Fulbright's name for the past 5 years), but if they are, I certainly hope they lose as much business as possible. And I don't particularly feel like looking into it here, and will just leave it at what I know, since I don't have too much love for KTF anymore, anyway. I'll just leave it at this – they were always the most stringent about making it impossible to register phones in their own names, and I hope that everyone goes to get SK service. Nyah, KTF!

Anyway, this guy was the hardest working guy in the phone business that day, because it took 3 hours to navigate my KTF number out of Fulbright's to SK, all while registering other people's phones and answer the questions of students and an elderly couple.

Actually, I can't change the name on the account just this moment because I moved the number (which essentially made a $500 phone nearly free) and I have to keep the account for 3 months; so the switch of service requires a 3-month use period, at which point I can change the name, which is just going to require one last thing from Fulbright and that's it.

But if you are a foreigner registering from scratch, you'd just walk in the store to do it, bringing along your passport, foreigner's registration card, and perhaps bank passbook; my problem was that we were changing numbers AND owners, with the latter being the sticky part that made the former switch a bit annoying when combined with their ongoing promotion to encourage users to switch carriers.

Whew! A lotta talk there. Lemme just show you what the old phone looked like, and how much I had pushed that baby to the end:

It was time, right? Look at the front, dudes! All the coins in my pocket were doing some serious erosion action on my phone. Reminder to self: put coins in the wallet pocket.

And I always hated the fat clamshells, enduring the phones getting fatter and heavier for years before the call of the Motorola RAZR started slimming things down. Here's the phone I have now:

Nice, baby. Thin. I never liked clamshells, but it's thin. And this is also called the "효자폰", or the phone that good kids buy for their elderly parents, since the phone is a bit wider than most, and the keys are spread out farther apart. This is good for me since I have big, American hands. And you know what they say about guys with big hands...they need big phones. No teeny, tiny slide action for me – I hate double-mashing keys when I type text messages.

It's like a RAZR, but Samsung. I am used to Anycall's hangul system, and I think it's the most logical, with the Korean being written sort of like the logic you'd use to write it. I can burn off a Korean text message in record time – one-handed – with Samsung's system.

And Anycalls are known to be strong, with my phone having withstood being thrown, dropped, sat on, doused with water, and nearly everything that you could but shouldn't do to a piece of electronic equipment. Anycall is my brand. Well, until I can get my hand on an iPhone.

And the logic of the menus and system is far better than before: I can now save my text messages separately (my previous phone just had room for 100, no save function, and when the slots filled up, it just stopped accepting texts!); when a phone call comes in, I have the option in the men to send a text message back; the only thing I complain about is that there's no electronic dictionary on this particular model, and that in English mode, it defaults to replying in English text messages, which my previous phone didn't do. I guess that's actually a logical improvement, but it's inconvenient for me.

Anyway.

I am very happy and impressed with my phone, as well as SK's service.

And I'm happy to report (one more time) that the age of foreigners not being able to register phones in their names is OVER. I did it, and the guy had the policy straight in my dinky neighborhood SK office, so other places have gotta know. If they tell you otherwise, they either didn't get the memo, or are just too pressed to be bothered with your foreign ass at that moment.

You could also print out the picture above and show them, but if the latter was the case, they're not gonna like you much.

Transformers Post Updated With Pics

Just a note to anyone who missed it. Scroll down or click here.