US Happened To Me

So I went to America last month. It was pretty awesome. I saw guns, big hamburgers, crafted beers, Danny Glover, bro-dudes, douchebags, Wal-Mart, commericals that I didn't know what they were selling, soft-serve ice cream, and my cousins.

Also when I was in America Macho Man "Randy" Savage died which pretty much sucked. I wrote a bunch of more detailed stuff about what I did when I was in America, but I did so in a marble composition notebook and I really don't feel like typing it over again. Maybe I'll scan it later, but until then, that's all I want to write about.

Homeownership

A lot of really random stuff has gone on over the past few months. I got drunk on red wine and sang in front of a thousand people in China and received a standing ovation for my performance. I went to Germany and ate lots of animals I don't really like all that much but ate because they're unavailable in Korea (venison, rabbit, lamb, etc.) I went to Hong Kong and did stuff that people do in Hong Kong.

All of these things are pretty decent excuses as to why I didn't write anything here in like a million hours. Well, those and the fact that I have an iphone, so all the stuff that five years ago would have been a blog post are now just uploaded from my iphone to Facebook. (ie. "Look at this poorly written English sign. Har har har!")

Perhaps the biggest reason I haven't written, at least during the past month or so is the fact that I now own property. My wife and I rented a small apartment and had a two year contract. That contract was up for renewal this spring. For reasons unknown to us, the price to rent an apartment suddenly became astronomically high in the area we were living in.

I suppose I should explain how housing works in Korea. If you need a place to live, there are three things you can do. First you can pay monthly rent. This works almost exactly the same as renting does in America. Second you can buy. Again nothing different here. You go to the bank get a ton of money give said money to current owner and sign a bunch of papers and its yours. Korea also has something between the two. They call it 전세 (jeonsae). Basically you give the landlord a huge chunk of money (at our last apartment it was like $100,000) and then you live in that apartment rent free for a set period, usually two years. At the end of that two year period you get your giant deposit back and you leave. How the landlord makes any real money under this system I'm not really sure, but it's a good way to make money for the tennant if you can afford that initial deposit.

So we did that for two years during which the price of jeonsae apartments rose...a lot. And a lot of them turned into standard rental properties. Apparently landlords figured that the jeonsae system wasn't really good for them unless they stole that money for the tennants (which was a real possibility and the reason I was not about living in a jeonsae apartment at all), so they all switched to regular rental properties...or jacked up their prices.

The prices to purchase an apartment did not follow suit. So we ended up with a situation where we would have to borrow money to do jeonsae, or borrow a little more money and own a house. Since neither my wife nor I are particularly stupid we decided to buy.

So we now live in a pretty decent sized apartment on the opposite side of the river from where we previously lived. Our house is roughly two times the size of our last apartment so there's a lot of space and everything looks really clean since we don't have to have stacks of stuff. We moved in at the end of April and are just now getting everything organized again. There are still some minor stuff that needs to be purchased like a dining table and curtains in the living room, but all the really major stuff has been attended to.

So there you go...a bunch of half assed excuses as to why I haven't written anything here in a very, very long time. While we're at it, I should probably just give my excuse for why I won't be writing here for the next 3-5 weeks. In 6 days I'm going to America for a business trip followed by a vacation to my hometown. So when all of that is done, I'll come back and write about the awesome stuff I bought at Target or how the Tri-City Valley Cats did while I was in town. And maybe one of these days I'll actually post some pictures of the new pad, though maybe not because I'm incredibly lazy.

LG Twins vs. Samsung Lions

Last night I went to see a baseball game with some coworkers after work. I haven't been to a ball game in lord knows how long, but it was a lot of fun. One of my minions at work is a huge LG Twins fan and his enthusiasm has been kind of infectious.

He and I along with three other coworkers headed off to Jamsil Stadium after work, arriving at the top of the third inning. We had free tickets so we found our seats and then someone was sent off for food and beers. Fried chicken is the food of choice at baseball stadiums in Korea appearently so that's what we had.

The Twins ended up losing, but it was a pretty rad trip out to the ball park. Watching baseball in Korea has a lot more fan participation than I ever recall baseball in the US having. There's chanting, people have drums and other noisemakers, and there are cheerleaders. It honestly reminded me a lot more of a pro-wrestling event in America than a triple A baseball game in America...which I think made it more fun. Seriously though, when is a sporting event that features hot girls ever a bad idea?

I'll probably go catch a couple more games at the stadium this season. Anyway there's not a ton to write about the fact that I saw a random baseball game other than the fact that I saw a random baseball game, so there you go. Samsung can suck it!

Playing Through The Backlog: Dragon Quest IX

I know it's been like 354 years since I last posted anything here, and for that I am dreadfully sorry. The first reason which I will get into greater detail at some other date has been a hectic work schedule since New Year. I've already been to China and Germany this year as well as playing host to customers from America and Dubai so the time I have to actually write anything greater than a couple words has been pretty much non-existant. I have been using Facebook to a greater degree as well as my truly awesome tumblr site, Mustaches of the 80s! The other reason I have not written here in nearly 4 months is because of the game pictured to the right, Dragon Quest IX. Every year at Christmas my mom sends a box of gift-like items to my wife and I. I say gift-like items, because usually it consists of food stuffs that are hard to locate in South Korea (taco seasoning and Duncan Hines cake mixes are prenial favorites) and assorted odd items. Each year we usually get one or two items that could legitimately be considered gifts. This year among the haul were the DVD of the back half of R. Kelly's Trapped In The Closet, and this DS game.

Back when I was a youth, Dragon Warrior was the first Nintendo game my family purchased (at a Silo if memory serves me correctly) outside of the Super Mario Bros. / Duck Hunt game pak that came with our system. I remember going with my dad to get a game. I wanted Zelda, but we ended up getting Dragon Warrior instead. Both of us were hooked, and for a time getting and playing a Dragon Warrior game was something that would happen over the Christmas holiday (except Dragon Warrior III, which I think was gotten during spring break). The Dragon Warrior series stopped being released in America for whatever reason after Dragon Warrior IV (which was released in such limited quantities, that I never played it until years later when my friend bought it from some used video game dealer). Ultimately the series was superceded in my household by the Final Fantasy series which pretty much continously released games.

I liked a lot of the Final Fantasy games, but around the time they made it to the Playstation 2, a lot of the stuff that had made them great was gone, replaced with angsty teenagers with oversized weapons and shitty haircuts. Dragon Quest IX has none of that, and in fact the game has kind of a retro feel to it. The first enemies you will fight include Dragon Quest/Warrior's iconic slime. The protagonist is a silent, nameless figure, your party starts off armed with bamboo poles, and many of the goals in the game are decidedly small scale. Only as the game progresses does it become clear that the fate of the world rests upon your shoulders.

That's not to say the entire game consists of throwbacks to an earlier age of gaming. Dragon Quest IX also features a lot of uh...features that are seemingly inspired by online games like Everquest or World of Warcraft, mainly multi-player capabilities, downloadable content, and Warcraft style quests.

The multi-player modes I did not have much experience with since it only works with the DS local network, and no one in my neck of the woods was playing. Though from what I've read, it seems like it would be a lot of fun.

The other thing that Dragon Quest IX borrows from more contemporary gaming is its accomplishments list. I don't know what game or system first came out with this, since there was a good 5 or 6 year period where I didn't really play any video games. My first exposure to it came from World of Warcraft, but I have no doubt some other game innovated it first. Anyway Dragon Quest IX has an insane number of accomplishments awarded for everything for achieving a certain level, or killing X number of monsters to wearing a particular outfit or defeating the game in a certain number of hours.

These accomplishments coupled with quests, optional dungeons, and downloadable content really increase the ammount of time one can spend playing Dragon Quest IX. I actually "beat the game" on a flight to Germany back in January of this year, but defeating the final boss was hardly the end of the game. If fact only after beating the last boss do a lot of quests become available. The quests are of the standard MMORPG ilk (kill X number of Y, bring doodad W to random guy Z), but on a portable system allow the game to be played in bite sized bits and still feel a sense of accomplishment. ("Oh I can totally kill 5 magi wyverns using inferno before the train gets to my stop!")

Anyway, the game is a ton of fun, especially if you're a fan of RPGs from the late 80s or early 90s. I've got a ton of writer's rust, so I'm going to toss up a random score for the game and hit the "Publish Post," button and call it a day. Catch you later Bill and Ted!

Rating:

An Aside From Germany

Nik Kershaw in Grrrmany and also beer going on.

X-MAS 2K10!!!

So Christmas has come and gone. This year JH and I had a fairly subdued Christmas, which was nice. Several years back we attempted to go out to eat on Christmas Eve. It was a disaster! There were a million people who had the same idea, so we couldn't get into any restaurant, and then when we finally did, they only had overpriced "set menus," so that night on our way home we vowed never to make the same mistake. Since then we have done Christmas at home.

This year was no exception. On Christmas Eve, after many hours of pretending to work at work, I headed home where JH and I prepared steak and assorted side-dishes for dinner. Dinner with wine happened before our outstandingly decorated fake Christmas tree with some festive tunes playing on our stereo. The weather lady said it would snow but it didn't. It was bitterly cold which was lame, but we were inside so it didn't really matter.

The next morning we got up and I baked some muffins and brewed some coffee. JH and I then exchanged gifts. We keep it pretty simple, but I did end up with the 25th Anniversary Super Mario Bros. Collection and Smash Bros. for Wii (I don't know what the English titles are since I have got Korean versions of said games).

After opening presents we watched A Christmas Story, which somehow I'd never showed to JH before, and some sort of Home Alone marathon playing on cable and spent our afternoon thusly. In the late afternoon we traveled to the opposite side of the city to visit JH's sister and her family.

Christmas marked the 100th day after her sister's second baby was born, which for some reason is still an event some Koreans see fit to celebrate even though infant mortality rates are now nearly 0%. So we had some food there and gave gifts to neices.

We stayed for a couple hours which was incredibly draining. Infants and toddlers are loud and tiring, and after a few hours I was more than ready to go home. When we did finally get home we both fell asleep almost immediately, thus putting an end to our Christmas.

Rush & Cash Commercial

About a million and a half years ago I had a different blog. Somewhere on that blog I wrote about a television commercial for a lending company that was on the air at the time that I found to be slightly odd. Half a million years ago I actually found a video of the commercial (the original post had pictures that I took of my television set as the commercial aired). I figured that since today is Christmas Eve, it would be seasonally appropriate to post that video file I downloaded all those years ago.

As for the commercial itself...well, much like those lovely presents all wrapped up in colorful paper beneath your tree I really don't want to ruin the surprise as to what I found peculiar about this particular commerical. Anyway, it's only like 30 seconds long, just watch it.



Anyway there you go. Merry Christmas!