a tiny island of sanity in a sea of crazy

Yale fully reinstates its pre-pandemic SAT/ACT requirement in admissions.

“These test scores are strong predictors of a student’s future Yale academic performance, and there is evidence that they are less subject to bias than other elements of an application.” pic.twitter.com/nQUCIHDai9

— Steve McGuire (@sfmcguire79) May 28, 2026

Smart people do dumbass things. Smarter people learn from their mistakes. I would love to see places like Yale claw back some of their respectability. As things stand, almost everyone in American academe is on my shit list.

but is it real or AI?

Air-gapping has never been so entertaining.

Normal: one-paragraph review

Bob Odenkirk as Sheriff Ulysses

Normal, directed by Ben Wheatley, released early in 2025, then generally in 2026, stars Bob Odenkirk in another unlikely-action-hero role (the movie has some of the same writing and producing DNA as Nobody), this time as a disaffected sheriff doing interim work in the snowy town of Normal, Minnesota—a town that had recently lost its sheriff. The citizens of Normal strike Sheriff Ulysses (Odenkirk) as bland but a mite strange. Ulysses himself is a bit detached and uncaring after having separated from his wife, but he becomes increasingly suspicious that something is not normal in Normal after several encounters with shifty townsfolk, the dodgy mayor (Henry Winkler), and strange details about the previous sheriff's death that don't add up. The town turns out to have made a deal with the devil: A branch of the Yakuza is storing a huge amount of gold and munitions there; in return, the Yakuza has rewarded the town handsomely for keeping silent. The previous sheriff had gotten too close to the truth, though, leaving behind an emotionally devastated daughter named Alex (Jess McLeod). A desperate couple of drifters (Reena Jolly, Brendan Fletcher) try robbing the town's bank, and all hell breaks loose as Sheriff Ulysses has to decide whom to side with and how to get out alive when almost everyone wants to kill him. A Yakuza member in town calls for reinforcements, and things get a lot worse before they get better. All in all, the film struck me as a poorly put-together turd (if such turds exist), but it's hard to fault the actors, who all did good work in their roles. Odenkirk's Sheriff Ulysses rediscovers his ability to care when he starts to pay fatherly attention to Alex and one of the robbers; Ulysses proves to be both affable and competent when faced with multiple chaotic threats, but I would've liked to see his relationship with the two young women, both in desperate need of guidance, explored in greater depth. Instead, the movie went for the easy gags and broad comedy when it could have gone for depth. In all, I wasn't even sure that this movie was worth writing about: It's lighter-than-light entertainment at best, but here you go—I managed a paragraph for you.

about kenpo

Speakman made it look impressive.

hello and goodbye

I've just sent off an application for a job at UNIST (Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology), a university based in Ulsan (located in the southeast, above Busan and just south of Gyeongju) that focuses on business and science—the practical stuff that I should've gotten into had I had any brains when I was younger. The UNIST website had a page for submitting job applications, but one drop-down menu at the very beginning refused to show me any menu items, and after I'd filled out the rest of the form, that one thing prevented me from sending the application. So since the job ad provided an email address, I very nicely put together the file-attachment packet of PDFs that UNIST was asking for, apologized in my email for sending my information in an alternative format, told the school I had tried to fill out their online form several times with no success, then thanked them for their patience. Along with the PDF attachments, I sent all the other information that the online form had asked for—name, address, employment history, education history, etc. So the UNIST app is now in the hands of the gods. I suspect the lady who receives my email will just trash it because it didn't come in the proper form. The bureaucratic mentality at work. But to be fair, it's easier for her to do things that way. Meanwhile, my thanks to Daniel for letting me know about Unijobs.kr, the site where the UNIST job appeared. So that was my hello to UNIST.

As for my goodbye, well... my ad in my building's lobby got taken down, so I guess I hadn't misunderstood when the admin guy had said the ad would be up for only a week (not 1 month + 1 week as I'd surmised after seeing the date he'd stamped on the thing). I don't really feel like putting up another ad right now, but I might in a few days. We'll see. I'm actually thinking of making a different ad to pawn off some of my current possessions, especially now that I know how to print QR codes that can lead people to emails or web pages or whatever. I can take photos of all of the items I want to sell (and I'll be selling them for very, very cheap), then instead of listing those items on a sheet of paper, I can list them on a particular webpage (probably just a webpage from one of my blogs... I never use the webpage feature for anything, anyway), then set up a QR code to print on the ad so that people can go to the webpage, figure out what they want to buy, then email me about meeting up to buy the desired item. Meanwhile, I can easily update the webpage as items sell and as I adjust prices.

I'm going to have to get rid of stuff, anyway, if I end up accepting a job outside of Seoul. I seriously doubt the above UNIST thing will result in a job. But one never knows.

In other news... I've had six ebook purchases since advertising the new ebook on both Instapundit and Substack. I think I'm becoming a bit of a known quantity on Instapundit; my comments there never earn me huge "like" responses (i.e., in the 50s and 70s; I usually get 6-10 upvotes) such as what happens with the big-time commenters, but I've apparently got enough people who know and trust me (and who trust that I can write) to have the tiniest of audiences now. So this new book is starting small, but it's already selling better than both versions of my homeschooling book (English-only ebook and English/Korean dead-tree book). We'll see what comes of all of this. I've been advised by some commenters to keep on reminding people of my new book; I had originally intended not to bother everyone with constant, in-your-face adverts in the comments, but I was told that many people hadn't even seen the first or second time I'd left a book-arrival announcement, yet they'd caught the third one, so more advertising is better if I want to be seen. Instead of going quiet, then, I'll keep shilling the book, albeit modestly.

As always, I've got several things happening at once. What a life, eh? Always in motion is the future. One person on Instapundit asked me when I was putting out a walk book. I guess I'd better get working on that, too.

they never learn (and by the way: it's over)

Just die already.

pics from yesterday's walk

a spray of flowers across the street from the doctor's office

Petunia Opera Supreme Raspberry—what a name!

On the walk I did after the doctor visit, I finally saw a pheasant after it had squawked. (10X zoom)

Pheasants are dull, clumsy, lame birds—except when their wings are folded, and the birds are just standing there, looking majestic. At that moment, and only at that moment, they possess a special beauty and dignity. Otherwise, when they make that awkward clucking/squawking noise, or when they deploy their stubby wings to glide clumsily at low altitude (I've never seen one fly high), they're some of the stupidest, most useless birds I can think of.

Probabilities are that any pheasant you see will be a male (M/F comparison here), loudly declaiming its desire to fuck. I used to think that springtime was their mating season, but male pheasants (a.k.a. COCK PHEASANTS!!) will squawk three out of four seasons of the year (and Korea has four seasons!*).

pheasant, 3X digital zoom

__________

*This is a thing Koreans proudly say, but which most Americans find bizarre. Except maybe those Americans who live in Florida or the desert.

le bilbo

In the 1989 Branagh movie Henry V, there's a humorous interlude where Emma Thompson's Princess Katherine, who is French, is asking her attendant Alice (played by Geraldine McEwan) how to say certain body parts in English. Katherine learns hand, fingers, nails, elbow, etc., with very strange French pronunciation, but when she tries reciting the parts back to Alice, she mistakenly calls the elbow a bilbo.

Below are some shots of my normally beleaguered bilbo, basically just to show that, this time around, there was no major needle-bruising from the blood samples taken out of both of my arms. I had both arms done during my recent hospital visit (the second time was to check insulin resistance), and I had my right arm done again during my visit to the doc just a couple of days ago. Normally, the bruising I get forms within just a few hours, but this time, there's been almost nothing, so I salute (not literally, not physically) the professionals for their rare exactitude. I normally come away from these visits with tiny war wounds.

right arm after visit to local doc

right arm's needle mark, exposed (hospital-visit needle mark not visible)

left arm: no trace of anything after the hospital visit

I hope you enjoyed this intimate look at my bilbo.

book vs. movie

I can't remember how much I concentrated on this issue in my review, but as this YouTube Short points out, the movie dumps most of the science in favor of the feelz.

Dad...?

frustrating

sweet memories

When I was in the fifth or sixth grade, I got placed in a GT (gifted and talented) program, which meant leaving my normal class and going out to a trailer next to the school building. Young as I was, I didn't question any of it and never considered how it felt to the poor young lady who had to spend her day in that quiet, relatively cramped space. I do remember she once misspelled the word vicious as viscous (a word I also happened to know), and I caught her out on that. She was gracious in accepting my correction, and I now wonder whether she'd misspelled the word deliberately in a sort of "Who's smart enough to catch this?" spirit.

cute little air-puppy

there's a Venezuela reference in there somewhere

this is awkward

I'm putting this video up months late, so it's less of an "anticipated movies" list and more of a "How're we doing so far?" list. As always, mea culpa.

cool either way

Wives- “did you have a productive day today?”

Husbands- “Watch this.”

Wives- “How much time did it take you to plan and execute this?”

Husbands- “Time?” pic.twitter.com/nDg1VOgH0x

— Tandy (@dantypo) May 26, 2026

I'm just envious that he was able to print the image so high.

health report

I got my health report, and when I get back from my walk, I'm gonna scan it in and create a PDF, then add it to my collection of PDFs. The report includes information about the Unvarnished Kevin, including a note about my enlarged heart (cardiomegaly or cardiac hypertrophy—I've had that for years; it's a symptom, not a condition in itself). One interesting thing: My height is apparently now under six feet: The report says 181.5 cm, or about 5.95 feet. I'm used to thinking of myself as 6'1.5", but I guess I've been stooping and shrinking. My weight, even while clothed, is listed as under 110 kg, which is nice: 109.4. Just 19 more kg to my goal weight, which I'll likely never reach until I'm a corpse leaking fluids all over a metal table. I guarantee, though, that I'll be feather-light after they cremate me.

Will interviewers wonder whether I'll croak in class? Well, I kind of wonder myself, but I think I can last at least an academic year and start building my savings back up.

And now, I'm gonna go for a walk.

raspy tongue feel good, don't it

pic.twitter.com/Q0PBB3FBPH

— No Cats No Life (@NoCatsNoLife_m) April 25, 2026

Hilarious comment beneath this embedded tweet:

Likes the taste of silicone...

good for you?

Before I visited the doc yesterday, I measured my blood sugar and discovered it was low at 108 (still not ideal). The night before (i.e., Monday night), I'd had only one evening snack: Anytime candies, which are marketed as sugar-free in Korea. They're honestly good. Maybe a little too good. Here's a look at the front and at the nutrition label:

"crisp and relaxing"... "mint flavored"

Mint flavor works well with sugar alcohols like erythritol, which also has a "cooling" effect inside the mouth. Some keto-heads don't mind it; others complain that it makes erythritol annoying to use in coffee or keto-bread recipes. (Erythritol has lately come under fire for stroke- and heart-attack-related problems as well.)

Note: carbs 90 g out of 92 g total, but 87 g sugar alcohol

Normally, a keto-head can safely discount the carbs in sugar alcohol and calculate net carbs only. If you read Korean and look about two lines above the nutrition information, though, you see the breakdown of the "sugar alcohols" inside Anytime candies. Note the #1 sugar alcohol is maltitol, which isn't considered keto because of its unusually high glycemic index of 52. Table sugar is 65, and erythritol is 0. BochaSweet (which I'm running low on after more than a year) is also 0. Maltitol is often touted as a "low-calorie" alternative to sugar, but instead of acting like its sugar-alcohol brothers, it goes rogue and acts more like regular sugar.

That said, the candies I ate (before I'd looked at the label and done all of the above thinking) didn't spike my blood sugar. Monday night, my blood sugar was looking good at 117. In the morning, I took my meds, waited almost two hours, and got a reading of 108. No blood-sugar spike (or it came and went while I was sleeping).

So while Anytime candies should be treated with caution given all of their maltitol. The other sugar alcohols listed in the above parenthetical include xylitol (GI of 7) and D-sorbitol (GI of about 4). The candy is still 77% maltitol, though, so don't eat fistfuls of it.

for a sec, I thought that wasn't her hand

a second recommendation letter!

My Korean ex-coworker sent me a very nice, if somewhat strangely formatted, recommendation letter. I didn't alter the PDF's contents, but with my PDF editing tools, I did make the document look a little less slipshod and a little more tightly arranged. When the PDF arrived, it awkwardly spilled over to a second page despite having only about a half page's worth of content. Basically, I widened the column of text and pulled the top and bottom design elements closer together (signature was its own design element, so I moved it up about an inch). And that's it. Problem solved. No more spillover to page 2. My only worry is that my ex-coworker's letter overstates my linguistic competence: In the letter, he calls me fluent in both French and Korean as well as English, which is not true. I'm a native English speaker, a fluent French speaker (I used to be able to say "near native," but no longer), and an intermediate-level Korean speaker. I'm very tempted to attach an electronic note to the PDF protesting my coworker's exaggerated claim. But the rest of the letter was very nice in tone and spirit, and since I can't ethically alter the letter's content, I'll just deal with the issue of fluency should it arise in an interview. Another one down.

Job stuff:

✓ 1st diploma copy, converted to PDF & apostilled (arrived)

✓ 2nd diploma copy, converted to PDF & apostilled (arrived)

☐ FBI criminal background check, apostilled (no word yet)

✓ 2nd letter of recommendation, converted to PDF

☐ 3rd letter of recommendation, converted to PDF (coming soon)

✓ copy of 4th certificate of employment (2005-2008) (SMU)

☐ sealed transcript from Catholic U. (grad school—on the way)

☐ sealed transcript from Georgetown U. (undergrad—on the way)

☐ health check; scan form and convert to PDF for job hunting (receiving 2moro)

Personal stuff:

☐ colonoscopy scheduling

✓ completed (& uploaded) first movie-review ebook ms

☐ get listed on Soomgo

☐ sample lessons for universities that prove interested in me

☐ sample lessons for KMA (which probably won't hire me)

☐ lessons for private tutoring (lower priority)—test prep & various subjects

☐ more Substack material to last through September

☐ more interactive quizzes for Substack (w/different question formats)

✓ ebook version of the first movie-review book, published

☐ dead-tree version of first movie-review book, ms prepped

☐ dead-tree version of first movie-review book, cover prepped

☐ dead-tree version of first movie-review book, published to Amazon

☐ ms for the second movie-review book (long-term project)—start working on it

I also found a few more errors in my book's manuscript. No stress; I've published the updates to the ebook version, which will show up while I'm still asleep. One person has bought the new ebook thus far, so that person will reap the benefits of an improved manuscript.

yes, exactly

hey, whatever chips away at the evil mouse

what... a... bitch

This is incredible. As in the Latin roots for unbelievable (in + credere = not + believe, same cred- root as in credit card, a card that operates on the trust that you will pay a borrowed sum back). As in I find it hard to believe this is real. If this is real, this woman is a soul-sucking bitch. And she's the witchy impetus behind the woman-rejecting MGTOW movement.

In happier news, I caught the wifely half of the husband-and-wife team that I'd wanted to catch yesterday (didn't see the husband anywhere), and I handed over four cookies her—one last almond-flour chocolate-chip cookie and three Toll House cookies. That felt nice. But after watching the above, I want to take a shower. Jesus.

I'm torn

This sketch is cute, but it contains all of the awful, low-hanging-fruit puns that don't require any cleverness or deep thinking to arrive at. That said, I want to like this video because, even though these are some truly lame puns, they come at the viewer in a barrage, which gives them some comic momentum. What do you think? Watch the video and tell me whether you found the sketch clever or just facile.

Honestly, I don't want to shit on this. The young lady made an effort to put together a fun little skit. But maybe because I traffic in language all the time, I'm just not as blown away by this as I should be. Am I just being an asshole?

'nuther gimmick?

vindication

I had to wait a bit for Foundation Day and the Buddha's birthday to be over with, but as she'd promised, Miss Cho at Sookmyung Women's University wrote back to me today... and her email included a PDF copy of my employment certificate, which I'm sure she simply typed up on the spot given the vagueness of the dates on the certificate: It shows only "2005 to 2008" and not "April 2005 to April 2008." Whatever. The document seems to have all the official trappings and stamps, so I can now say that, in the eyes of Sookdae, I did in fact teach there. It's nice to have confirmation that I existed.

Getting this document was like pulling teeth, but none of this would have happened had it not been for British my ex-colleague Zoe, now living in England, who had made the suggestion to dig up my tax documents as proof of employment. So thank you, Zoe!

That's one more piece of the puzzle.

Job stuff:

✓ 1st diploma copy, converted to PDF & apostilled (arrived)

✓ 2nd diploma copy, converted to PDF & apostilled (arrived)

☐ FBI criminal background check, apostilled (no word yet)

☐ 2nd letter of recommendation, converted to PDF (coming soon)

☐ 3rd letter of recommendation, converted to PDF (coming soon)

✓ copy of 4th certificate of employment (2005-2008) (SMU)

☐ sealed transcript from Catholic U. (grad school—on the way)

☐ sealed transcript from Georgetown U. (undergrad—on the way)

☐ health check; scan form and convert to PDF for job hunting (receiving 2moro)

Personal stuff:

☐ colonoscopy scheduling

✓ completed (& uploaded) first movie-review ebook ms

☐ get listed on Soomgo

☐ sample lessons for universities that prove interested in me

☐ sample lessons for KMA (which probably won't hire me)

☐ lessons for private tutoring (lower priority)—test prep & various subjects

☐ more Substack material to last through September

☐ more interactive quizzes for Substack (w/different question formats)

✓ ebook version of the first movie-review book, published

☐ dead-tree version of first movie-review book, ms prepped

☐ dead-tree version of first movie-review book, cover prepped

☐ dead-tree version of first movie-review book, published to Amazon

☐ ms for the second movie-review book (long-term project)—start working on it

I also went in for my health check at the local doc today; I can pick up my report tomorrow afternoon, so I'll be by around 2 p.m. for that. My BP this morning was low at 97/67 (123/63 at the clinic, a few hours after having taken my meds this morning), and my blood sugar was down to 108, which is a lot better than it had been. At the clinic, they did a blood draw and got my urine sample; I also got a chest X-ray that required me to remove my shirt and wear a smock. The nurses were all very friendly. Unlike the last time I'd done a health checkup at this clinic, I didn't have to fill out a long patient history, thank Cthulhu. They weighed me, took a measure of my height (I think I'm shrinking as I age), and gave me an eye test with my contacts still in. I think I did okay with those tests. I think. I'll know more tomorrow when I read over my health report. All that really matters is that I be healthy enough to teach.

Some universities require that you get a health check from a specific clinic, so we'll see whether I have to go through this rigamarole* yet again. I hope not. I hope this health report will be enough. One more document for the repertoire.

__________

*I grew up with riga-marole. The first time I heard rig-marole, I did a double take, then looked the word up. Apparently, both are legitimate—rigamarole and rigmarole. Which do you say? I think rigamarole rolls off the tongue more easily.

"Hurt": the story behind the Johnny Cash cover

I had heard this awesome story years ago, and I'm happy to see it retold here so I can share it. You may have to click on the tweet to see the whole story.

"Hurt" is not an original by Johnny Cash. The song was written by Trent Reznor (Nine Inch Nails) in 1994 for the album The Downward Spiral. Rick Rubin had to insist several times on Cash recording his version, at first Johnny found the idea completely insane because the original… pic.twitter.com/nDP2BqIvzn

— Ladytron Fan Account (@Lady_FanAccount) May 25, 2026

This story is a reminder that, however goofy and misguided so many artists are, they can also be examples of great collegiality, openness, and humility.

"cobra chicken"

is this a trend now?

Is this a trend now? People being snotty to each other at the grocery store?

There’s always a bigger brain… this cashier proved it! 😂 pic.twitter.com/R2kVcI6Yc1

— Be Believing (@Be_Believing) May 25, 2026

I really hope this was scripted and meant just for clicks.

fishy, fishy, fishy-fish...

pic.twitter.com/9bVZOwsGX5

— chaotic memes (@memechaotic) April 25, 2026

constant vigilance!

Correct the bad punctuation.

alien coda

Who's the thing at the end of The Thing?

batches and batches

When you've got a small oven and lots of cookies to bake, there's little choice but to bake the cookies in small batches. Many small batches. My almost-keto cookie recipe yielded 19 cookies today (three overbaked, so only sixteen, really), and my Toll House recipe (nothing keto about these) yielded 30 cookies—one of which broke, so 29. I can put in one batch of eight on the oven's middle shelf. It's been killing me all day long not to ingest even a single morsel of cookie dough or even a baked cookie. Didn't even lick my fingers. I hope this restraint is earning me some good karma, but the fight against my fat and my metabolism is an eternal one. And I need to be as "clean" as possible for tomorrow's doctor checkup (well, I'm going to try to visit the doc tomorrow, but I can easily imagine him taking an extra day off to lengthen his Buddha's Birthday holiday, so I may have to go back on Wednesday).

The final batch of Toll House just popped out of the oven; I need to start wrapping the cooled-down ones. I've already wrapped all sixteen edible almost-keto cookies; once I've got sixteen of the Toll House ones wrapped, I'll be able to give away ten pairs of cookies to the grocery staff (assuming the store is even open today; today is the extended holiday for the Buddha's birthday), then go up to the lobby to give away four pairs of cookies to the concierge staff. I might have one or two extra pairs of cookies to give away; there's a basement-resto ajumma and ajeossi (married couple) who've always been friendly to me; if they're around, I'll give the last two pairs of cookies to them. If I had thought ahead, I'd have bought some tiny, little gift bags in which to place the cookies in along with a message sporting my face so they know who this "Kevin" is. Here are some some shots of tonight's cookies:

sixteen keto-ish almond-flour cookies, all in a row

one keto-ish cookie up close

Toll House cookies in a small tray, having oozed into the tray's corners, guaranteeing strange shapes.

Lots of Toll House cookies. Did you notice the broken one? Yeah, that one's mine.

In theory at least, I'll be giving out 16 keto-ish and 16 Toll House cookies tonight, which will leave me with zero keto-ish and 13 Toll House cookies. For lunch with the boss this coming Saturday, I'll probably make more batches of the cookies, plus a rum cake, but I might go gentle on the rum based on my Korean ex-coworker's negative reaction to the alcohol.

UPDATE: I didn't see the restaurant couple, so I gave some cookies to the very undeserving sushi guy, whose resto I tried once (when he'd opened his place) and decided never to try again thanks to skimpy portions, poor quality, and over-fried prawns. I gave out ten pairs of cookies to the grocery staffers, then went upstairs and gave four pairs of cookies to the lone concierge—the friendliest guy on staff. I quickly explained that half the cookies were made with almond flour, and the other half were "regular" chocolate-chip cookies. So of the sixteen pairs of cookies, I came back with one pair left over.

Ricky vs. the reporter

IT IS HERE!

My newest ebook—Sights, Sounds, Words, Volume 1: Movie & Book Reviews, 2004–2015—is now available for sale on Amazon.com. I found a ton of goofy typos with the help of Amazon's e-text preview app and AI, and I found a few more random errors—misspellings that looked like regular words (e.g., at one point, I had mistyped single as singe). The latter type of error is much harder to catch, and before I put out the dead-tree version of this book, I'm going to have to comb through the ms very, very carefully to make sure every last error gets caught and corrected. I'm not looking forward to slogging through a 400-plus-page manuscript yet again, but I'm going to dive back into it later this week.

Today, though, I'm taking a break from walking and manuscripts to bake and distribute cookies to my building's staff (concierges and grocery employees, mostly). Tomorrow, I'm taking a very early-morning walk, then seeing my local doc about getting a health checkup for my hypothetical university job. Also later this week: I'm visiting KMA to see what I can see and looking into getting onto the Soomgo app, where I'll hang out my private-tutoring shingle. I've got a lunch on Saturday, May 30, with the boss and his family, and things just get busier from there. Disappointingly, I haven't seen anything other than summer-camp ads on Dave's ESL Cafe, and Unijobs.kr isn't currently showing anything I can plausibly sink my teeth into. Maybe my guess was wrong that university job ads would come out in May. Maybe I should've said June. All that said, go pick up a copy of my new ebook for only $2.99. If you find any further typos in it, email them to me, and I'll make corrections. If you've bought the book (and you must have if you're finding typos), then rest assured your purchased text will be updated with the corrections I implement. That's one of the nice things about Amazon ebooks.

ADDENDUM: If you're holding out for the dead-tree book, it'll be out sometime in late June.

remember

Memorial Weekend
2026 🇺🇸 🫡

This is such a poignant and respectful remembrance for all 9,387 US soldiers who paid the ultimate price for our freedom on D-Day in Normandy.

French caretakers’ tradition of taking sand from Omaha Beach and scrubbing it into the letters of the… pic.twitter.com/f6Pn0zT9iW

— Tom Moore (@junogsp7) May 24, 2026

when the skull is a glass house

When I was younger, I lived just a stone's throw away from a family who all died of mysterious head injuries.

— Weapon 𝕏 (@HellRaz0r1776) May 16, 2026

Allez, Yuri!

 

what Westerners are primed to see

Perception can be cultural.

a slave to work

it's all about the waiting now

I've spent all day (and it's now technically Monday) finalizing my ebook manuscript, and I've uploaded the ms plus the front-cover art. Monday, I'm going to tear my attention away from the book so I can bake some cookies as a belated Buddha's Birthday gesture to our building's concierges and our grocery-store staff, who are almost all very friendly and helpful (except for one strange-looking lady who seems a little, uh, avoidant).

The process to upload a manuscript as a Kindle doc is complicated. First, you open the Kindle Create app on your desktop. Next, inside the app, you find the MS Word document that you want to convert to Kindle Create format. Hit "convert." Next, you have to comb through the converted document to unfuck all of the formatting fuckups in a 400-plus-page manuscript. This takes hours, and these errors can be anything from unnecessary font-size changes for chapter titles to text-alignment problems not found in the original document but generated simply by the act of converting the file from MS Word to Kindle. You are, of course, creating a "reflowable text" document from what had originally been a "fixed text" document, which may be one reason for all of the conversion problems.

After hours staring at your document and correcting all of those little errors, you must next export your Kindle document to its final format: KPF (also known as .kpf). That's right: Just because you converted your doc to the Kindle Create file format doesn't mean your file is ready for upload! The beast must assume its final form! So, .kpf it is.

Once that final conversion is done, and your cover art has the proper dpi and dimensions and file format (300dpi .jpg in this case, 1600 × 2560 so it looks good on tablets), you may now go to Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing and start the product-uploading process. Select "ebook" as the thing to upload, then enter the title, author, and ISBN information. Click off the SEO categories and subcategories by which to find your book, then start uploading (by the way, this is only a rough description of the process; I'm tired, so I'm not going to retrace it/relive it step by step). My cover art uploaded just fine, but when I uploaded my .kpf-formatted manuscript, I got a flag saying there were at least fifteen spelling errors.

I guess Amazon wants to make sure every ms it receives is letter-perfect to protect its company image. Whatever AI the company is using, though, is awesome. My own piece-of-shit MS Word for Mac did a final run-through evaluation of my document and told me there were no spelling errors at all, which turned out to be a load of shit. So I opened up the Kindle Create version of my document, the MS Word version, and activated the online Kindle previewer, which showed me every single spelling error it had caught. And wow, were some of those errors old. I know I make typos all the time, especially after my stroke, but fifteen, even in a 400-plus-page document, seems a little shameful. Still, I was too wowed by the Amazon AI's awesomeness to feel guilty. If anything, I was glad the errors had been caught: You don't want to look like a fool when you're first publishing something. Quality control matters.

Using the Amazon Kindle previewer and error-finder as my guide, I then proceeded to correct (1) the uploaded .kpf manuscript showing in my preview screen, (2) the Kindle Create version of the ms on my desktop, and (3) the MS Word version, which I need in order to make the PDF for the dead-tree version of my book (out in a month, I hope). The process of correcting errors in all three documents took another two hours, but when I hit "upload changes," the .kpf document successfully uploaded this time. Cue my sigh of relief.

There was more stuff to fill out and enter, then the flag came up saying my book would take up to 72 hours to appear and be on sale. In my experience, ebooks appear a lot faster than 72 hours. All the same, I'll be sure to announce it when it shows up (it hasn't yet). It'll doubtless be there when I wake up in the morning.

There's already one little change that I saw I'd need to make (copyright page—not a major thing), so I'm going to have to reupload the revised .kpf file once the book is out (you can't reupload before then). Come to think of it, I'll do the reupload first before announcing that the book is out. It makes little sense to have customers buy the book before it's completely ready (even though changes can be made to the book even after a purchase, and the revisions will appear in the purchased ebook copy).

Oh, yeah—someone else bought a copy of my Think Like a Teacher ebook.

he's very... polite

Americans—and it's not entirely their fault—have screwed-up ideas about Japanese food. Guilty as charged.

finalization day

Everything in the movie-review book is written. I have front matter, a preface, a table of contents, an afterword, and a bio, all now bookending the movie and book reviews that are the volume's main content.

I converted my manuscript to a Kindle-format file, but as Murphy's Law would have it, lots of little formatting changes crept in, so I have to go page by page through the thing and make fixes wherever I find problems. Better brew myself some dang tea. Shower first, though.

"I do declare, Mr. Human..."

another walk today

Another 10K walk today, but no photos. Instead, I'm slapping up an image of a map showing me right at my turnaround point (exactly halfway), with the distance home shown. Multiply that distance times 2 to get the total distance I walk. I've seen that half-distance number vary anywhere from 4.5 km to 5 km, hence my constantly changing estimates of how far I'm walking when I go up to the Han River and back.

an image from yesterday's walk, from right at my U-turn point

It was a hotter walk than yesterday; I can tell that summer is cranking up. Pretty soon, I'm going to have to make the terrible choice to walk either late at night or very early in the morning. The latter choice might be interesting if only because it would feel as if I were on one of my trans-Korea walks.

yes, ma'am

Somehow, she's even hotter now.

what my lawn sign would be

sagesse merdique

Do you know who Laocoön is? He's the Trojan priest who warned the walled city not to let in the wooden horse. His warning is normally paraphrased as, "Beware Greeks bearing gifts." (More literally, "I fear the Greeks even when they bear gifts.")

firty dighting!

today's walk

Today was a gorgeous day for a walk, and it wasn't even that hot except when I was out in direct sunlight. In the shade, things were decidedly cool, and my walk to the Han River included plenty of shade. First—a parade of roses on the way to the footbridge that takes me out of my neighborhood and toward the Tan-cheon.

This bunch of roses was at an awkward angle, so I had to hold the camera low.

roses hangin' out by a neighborhood park

Gettin' a little tired in the direct sunlight... I can relate.

Try not to think Georgia O'Keeffe thoughts.

richly pink

brazenly open—Madam! I do declare!

Just how many roses are there?

a sort of artsy, photo-op kind of trellis

This one seems to have about had it. It's only spring, ma'am!

deep red

Hang in there.

the pinker club

This is a nice shot.

There were white roses and ones that tended toward yellow/orange.

nice, but looking a little frazzled

pink, pink, pink

We breed them for their proudly exposed genitals.

Another halfway decent shot.

shooting downward from the ascending footbridge

I bet there was a cat involved.

Tan-cheon fishy, fishy, fishy fish that went wherever I did go.

It was big. Would you call this a carp? I bet it tastes like creek mud.

The AI god guesses this is a Soragoi koi (a type of carp).

corn poppies, red poppies, or Flanders poppies (In Flanders fields...)

el gato, seen on the way back to my place

too intent on hunting something to care about me

still stalking

I'd had a bit of a rough night yesterday, but there was not a twinge of angina during today's walk despite my 4-kph pace (slow for the rest of you, but fast for me).

Anyway, it really was a perfect day for the walk I took. I'll likely walk again tomorrow. But I've also got some cookies to bake and to dole out in my apartment building for the Buddha's birthday. Happy Birthday, Shakyamuni/Seokgamoni!