on not using AI for fan films

That looks to be the next frontier: giving human and other living characters actual emotion. AI still looks pretty dead, and when it does evoke emotion, the emotion tends to be a sort of bland cheerfulness. Even screaming characters don't look emotionally engaged. Lots of work to do. That said, AI within limits has done a good job of producing some ridiculously humorous videos. If you're okay with the still-surreal physics.

relative popularity

If we judged short stories in terms of view numbers, then my two Five Stories in Five Days events on Substack went like this, from most-viewed to least-viewed:

5SI5D I:

1. "Very, Very Bad Erotica"
2. "When Mr. Fusion Finally Arrived"
3. "Alien Life"
4. "A Tale of Ass"
5. "Telekinetically Yours"

5SI5D II:

1. "Don't Interrupt"
2. "Little Billy in Hell"
3. "Why Good Self-Expression Matters"
4. "Telekinetically Yours 2"
5. "Nanospray"

Some notes:

1. "Very, Very Bad Erotica" was me channeling the absurdity of Mark Leyner. If you've never read Mark Leyner, may I suggest his Et Tu, Babe? I still smirk cynically when I think about all of the people who flocked to my post with prurient interest and were doubtless disappointed by the silliness they'd beheld.
2. "When Mr. Fusion Finally Arrived" was my humble attempt at teasing out the implications of a spectacular, new power source and how it might change life and society. In the end, it didn't change much. I'm more partial to the notion that "history rhymes" than to the idea that history is some kind of relentless, inevitable, linear progression, some march to an Omega Point. Nonsense.
3. "Alien Life" was a riff off the idea that octopi (octopuses, octopodes) are truly alien in nature, yet their way of apprehending the world follows much the same physics-rooted logic as it does for us humans. I've been fascinated by octopi since childhood and still wish I could keep one as a pet, but knowing me, I'd accidentally kill it.
4. "A Tale of Ass" is my favorite of the first group, and the most Zenny. From its low ranking, I can guess that most people didn't get it at all. Sigh... what a benighted group of readers. But to be fair, I guess they haven't been exposed to Zen approaches to the world before. To be sure, the stereotype of Zen as iconoclastically antiscriptural—with monks slapping each other over the head, farting everywhere, and using sutras as toilet paper—is hilariously wrong. But this isn't to say that the Zen way of looking at life isn't without its own unique sense of humor.
5. I'm sad to see "Telekinetically Yours" in last place because this one was most rooted in my own real, personal life. I experience the frustration of being "thwarted" every single goddamn day, and writing about Marv was a little bit cathartic. Don't you ever wish that you could have just one day where absolutely everything went the way you wanted it to, from A to B, with no hitches? For some of us, the world never shows us that face.
6. "Don't Interrupt" was my sop to right-wing readers who are sick of rude, crass, left-wing culture and the way it constantly shouts, interrupts, mocks, and shits all over everything. At my most nightmarishly Hitlerish, I would line all of these loud, stupid people up against a long wall and gun them down one by one, a quick pop to each skull. The problem is that, after committing mass murder, I'd enjoy quiet for about one day, then a new crop of loud assholes would appear.
7. "Little Billy in Hell" was written over 25 years ago. It still holds up today. Hell isn't just for bad people... as little Billy finds out.
8. "Why Good Self-Expression Matters" is once again me venting my frustration about sloppy people and their sloppy writing. The idea, which might not have been clear in this first story, is that there's something supernatural about the sexy lady. Maybe she's a demoness or a succubus. Either way, she's a force that's out to punish the mentally slobbish. And if this story gets sequels, there will be punishment galore.
9. "Telekinetically Yours 2" is a further exploration of how Marv deals with life now that he's got his new powers. And as you see, life is still annoying for him.
10. I had the most trouble writing this story. Originally, I had written only the expository crap about nanospray and nanoswarm technology. But a story that's all exposition is a pile of shit, which "Alien Life" was also in danger of becoming. While out for a walk, I had the idea of interleaving the exposition with a more personal story of a rich kid whose dad is involved with nanotech, which is why the kid and his girlfriend get captured and suspended from roof beams until the kid gives up his dad's passcodes.

the vortex of sensitivity

Ever met anyone like this, where nothing you say is taken the right way?

dinner

As threatened/promised, tonight's dinner was chili dogs. And yes, I put pickles on mine. We all have our quirks. As you see in the photos below, the buns were so flat and collapsed that I didn't bother to split them. Chili was typical hot-dog chili, i.e., a bit runny with meat only (ground beef), no beans—the kind of chili that's easy for a hot-dog vendor to slop onto a dog quickly with a single swipe of the spoon.

buns and American cheese, microwaved for a bit of a melt with pickles placed on after

Had I not split the dogs, they would have slid off the pickles. Putting them on face-down would've been better.

now be-chilied

A good meal in all. I didn't bother to make tomato soup. Maybe for a quick meal tomorrow.

I'm sure we all think the same thing

How do people let their homes get this way?

I've come to a couple of decisions

As my budget shrinks and tightens around me like an existential boa constrictor, I've come to a few practical decisions since I have only so many hours in a day:

1. While I had seriously considered ending this blog (not deleting it—just stopping all the posting), I will instead just end all of the YouTube/meme nonsense at the end of July, posting only what I want to post, and not posting out of a sense of obligation. In the end, my blog is primarily for me. Stopping all of that is going to be a huge load off my shoulders, and I'll be able to devote more time to growing and cultivating my Substack. And maybe the change will help to mitigate the bot traffic, which is only fake traffic anyway. When your blog has big numbers but only a tiny smattering of comments from the same three or four people, you know it's bots.
2. I'm going to start walking at night as of this week. Summer schedule—activated.

This coming week, I'll be waiting to hear from KNU in Sangju. While I'd very much like to work there, I'm mentally prepared to bite the bullet, find a local hagweon,  and begin my year of slavish part-time misery.

one of my brothers lives in a Chicago suburb

verbal judo, Spidey-style

two awesome shots found at Instapundit

fantastic metalwork

About the above image, the AI god says:

This item is a decorative wrought-iron porch light featuring a detailed dragon figure, located on the Casa Bruno Quadros building in Barcelona, Spain.

• Designer: Josep Vilaseca
• Location: La Rambla, Barcelona, Spain
• Creation Date: 1885
• Style: Modernisme (Catalan Art Nouveau)

As for the above, the AI god claims:

This image shows a public art installation known as the "Undulating Dragon" on a building in Clayton, New Mexico.

Artist and Origin: The metal sculpture was designed and installed by artist Bennie Duran in the mid-1990s.

Design: It is a Chinese-style dragon made of metal that appears to snake in and out of the brick wall of the building.

Location: The sculpture is located on a building at 315 N. First Street in Clayton.

Status: The building was formerly a gallery and a trading post, but is now abandoned or vacant.

These are both awesome for different reasons. The second shot reminds me of the "swimming dragons" I frequently pass by on the Nakdong River trail. See here and scroll down.

the soy-boy punch

MFer caught this soyboy's sucker punch in midair and tossed it....Absolutely legendarypic.twitter.com/CEYmbSAHSC

— Jayroo (@jayroo69) April 20, 2026

watch that Ozempic use, guys

me on the left

today's meal

Let me take you through today's linner—lunch and dinner. It was hot dogs with "carnivore" buns plus two salads bought from my basement grocery. I also had a strawberry yogurt and, mea culpa, a couple mouthfuls of Nutella. Yes, I went off the chain.

I made the hot-dog buns using the little bun pans I had bought long ago. The carnivore-bread recipe I used is the same one I've used before (see here for recipe); it's extremely simple, but one of the ingredients—heavy-cream powder—is a bit esoteric for me. I hadn't even heard of such a powder until a few months ago. There are other, similar powders, too: "regular" milk powder, goat's-milk powder, butter powder, etc.

The recipe I use calls for only three ingredients: heavy-cream powder, eggs, and baking powder (lead-free if possible). I added a fourth ingredient: cream of tartar, itself another kind of powder. Cream of tartar is incorporated into baked, fluffy dishes (e.g., soufflés) as a way to keep the dishes firm and prevent collapse. I'll save you the suspense and say that the addition of a half-teaspoon of cream of tartar seemed to do nothing to help my carnivore bread, but look at the pics below, and you be the judge.

Here's what one of my little hot-dog pans looks like. It's meant for buns made of real bread. Since I knew how much my eggy mixture would balloon up during baking, I decided to create tiny sarcophagi by doubling up the pans to contain the bread's rise and create geometric—not craggy—buns. The first few pictures show the concept.

one of the tiny pans

mini-sarcophagus

mini-sarcophagus, different angle

I'm reminded of Spock's funerary photon-torpedo housing/coffin in Star Treks II and III.

Not cocaine! Heavy-cream powder, baking powder, and cream of tartar.

uh-oh

Anyone who cooks will tell you that the above picture doesn't show a good thing. If your eggs float in water, they're probably bad. Ideally, eggs should sink in water. I went ahead and cracked mine open anyway, and they smelled and looked okay enough, but I suspect that eating raw dough made from those eggs would not have been a good idea.

the eggy mixture, a.k.a. protobread

I laid out 100 g of the mix into each little pan.

I should've used a piping bag to make everything neater.

There was extra dough, which I decided to bake as well as a separate Brötchen (a roll, but literally a "breadlet").

After 15 minutes from a cold start... dammit, ignore the dirty oven!

sarcophagi, opened, with disappointingly thin buns

The yellow from the eggs makes this vaguely reminiscent of cornbread.

And now, since I have corn extract, I have an idea.

a good one up close

the breadlet

another decent one

cut open and cooling

While the breadlets were all limp upon exiting the oven, as they cooled, they got firmer.

a bit of egg white that betrays the bread's pedigree

dill pickles, chopped into a kind of relish

I know, relishes usually have some liquid in them, but I was fine with the above.

my meal and my Coke Zero

I garnished these hot dogs (pack of six) with sriracha, mustard, and "relish." Sunday's dogs will be chili dogs, and I've got some el-cheapo cheese for that. Instead of a salad, I might also make a tomato soup tomorrow. I bought some passata, and I have plenty of heavy cream.

store-bought salad

The above double salad, a pretty standard serving for me, comes out to about 500 calories, and the few grams of carbs come from the bizarre addition of frosted corn flakes. When I measure my blood sugar a few hours after having such a salad, though, there's no blood-sugar spike. The corn flakes are there for texture and don't add much nutritionally.

Normally, I buy two matching salads so I don't have to worry about conflicting salad dressings when I combine the salads into my large, metal bowl. This time around, though, I had one salad with chicken and "Oriental" dressing, and another salad with mashed Korean sweet squash (called dan hobak in Korean, kabocha in Japanese) and a balsamic dressing. So I chose balsamic this time around and, knowing that a single packet of dressing for two salads would not be enough, I made a few teaspoons of balsamic-vinegar dressing myself: olive-oil base, half that weight in balsamic vinegar, black pepper, garlic, and a wee bit of my dwindling supply of BochaSweet instead of sugar. Stir that up, and while it's not quite an emulsion, it's good enough to toss into the salad. Had I wanted an emulsion, I could have added a pinch of xanthan gum, which is a minimally processed ingredient used to make emulsions (like the "Italian" dressing at the grocery that sits in its bottle and never seems to split).

So—that was the meal that improved my mood and my outlook. 

Looking forward to chili dawgs!

feeling better tonight

Glory unto Cthulhu! I am now in my postprandial state—filled with hot dogs (in my stomach, not up my ass) and salad and strawberry yogurt (carby—premade fruit yogurts are all bad for you; try making them yourself instead of doing what I did, i.e., buying one off the shelf). 

I had originally thought not to work on my book today, to put it out of my mind entirely, but I followed my impulse to look up some AI-suggested YouTube tutorials on proper book formatting on MS Word for 6 × 9 books, and I'm glad I did because one video in particular was very educational. It pretty much helped me to unfuck my situation, and for the past few hours, I have been back on course and reworking my manuscript. As the psychobabble-prone people like to say, I'm in a much better place now.

This isn't to say that the task I'm involved with is a breeze. It's not. I had to downsize my text margins to an acceptable width for Amazon KDP; that took several iterations even after I'd watched that YouTube tutorial. There was a lot of trial and error, but I could tell that I was on the right track. When narrowing my margins increased the size of my book by over 100 pages, I knew I would have to drop my font size by a point, from 12 to 11. And once again, I have to comb through every damn chapter, searching out all of the widows, orphans, and runts to correct. In doing all of this, I've learned a lot more about some of MS Word's more esoteric features, and I'm almost cocky enough to think I should maybe advertise my manuscript-prep services, charging a few thousand dollars a pop, to help people design and populate their books' interiors—editing and formatting manuscripts, etc. Each such job would be a slog, but given everything I've learned over the past week or so, I'm feeling more capable now than I'd felt earlier today. I don't want to become overconfident, but figuring out the margins issue with the help of that tutorial was a game-changer; a lot is clearer to me now. 

So I'm once again in the finalization stage, but slogging through the 122-chapter manuscript page by page is no picnic. At the same time, it's also no longer a random, mysterious process now that I've had it explained to me, and that's what feels so good. So my original promise to have both versions of the movie-review book ready by the end of June still stands. I think I might even be done before this coming Wednesday.

rug cleaning: frozen edition

equipment matters

under the bed

I cleaned under my bed the other day. It's a job I'd been putting off for a damn year at least. What a slob. And sure enough, the accumulated dust and hair under the bed were unbelievable. Lifting the mattress to be able to pull out the plastic supports that act as both frame and legs caused some massive bursts of static electricity. Snap. Crackle. Pop. The dust-clearing job required plenty of wet towelettes and a lot of elbow grease (the major reason why I'd kept putting the job off), but it all got done in the end.

If there's a chance I might be moving out sometime over the next few months, I'm going to have to clean up a lot more than this. Schmutz is everywhere.

ugh

I'm feeling kind of depressed right now. 

First, there's the movie-review book problem. I thought making one or two corrections to a nearly error-free manuscript would be enough, but now, Amazon KDP is being a bitch and complaining about how my text doesn't have a sufficient gutter for the 6 × 9 format, how my cover image isn't bleed-to-the-edge, etc., etc. It didn't give me any grief during my first upload of the manuscript, so what happened? I spent all of yesterday trying to get everything perfect, and when I reuploaded my manuscript... more of the same complaints from the Amazon system. So late last night (this morning, technically), I gave up. It was all just too much.

Second, I haven't heard from UNIST, SCH, or Hanyang about EFL-prof work. KNU, for its part, says it won't start replying to potential hires until Monday the 22nd.* My ex-boss, with whom I occasionally commiserate, is in a somewhat similar situation. He's been working various part-time jobs but can no longer seem to secure the kind of high-paying work he'd had in the past. With his fluent Korean, he used to work for local government officials and hosted radio and TV shows. His last job, in which he was my boss, was netting him over six figures (that's US dollars). He's got nothing like that now, and he thinks part of the problem is his age (mid-60s). I haven't had the heart to ask the ex-boss how sustainable he thinks his current situation is. He's got a wife and two sons, which means he already has to spend plenty of money every month. He lives in the rich part of town, in a very nice apartment, which costs him God-knows-how-much. How much longer can he go this way? If he's saved up a massive amount of money from his previous jobs, then he could theoretically go on for a few more years. But any well that's lost its source of water cannot last forever.

My impression is that the Korean job market is looking for young, fresh, energetic meat, not old fogies like us, to attract students. If you've stayed in one place and made a name for yourself instead of hopping around nomadically, you've managed to put down roots and become a known, respected commodity. If, on the other hand, you've zigzagged around trying anything and everything for years, you've got no roots anywhere.

That reminds me of something. The words of the old CEO of the SsangYong Paper company, where I'd worked for a few months in 1996, come back to me. The CEO's name was Park; he was a temperamental asshole, an old man with dyed-black hair, who started every morning with a long, ranty shouting session in which he would gather his managers and directors in a conference room and harangue them for their perceived failures. My classroom—his employees were required to attend my 7:00 a.m. class for an hour a day—was right next door, and I could hear the shouting through the thin door that separated us. Every day, I would teach for an hour, then spend the rest of the day as an office prole, proofreading English-language correspondence to be faxed overseas (this was right on the cusp of the email era). Despite being an asshole, the CEO gave me some parting advice during my exit interview in the fall of 1996: "Dig a deep well," he said in English. "There are people who dig shallow holes all over the place. They never find water. Stay in one place and dig a deep well." (He was probably referring to my leaving his company only a few months after joining.)

To my shame now, I recall leaving CEO Park's office while sneering at his advice, which reeked of the blind company loyalty that my father—a pre-Boomer born in 1942 like Joe Biden—had shown his whole working life to Northwest Airlines, a company that routinely shafted and reamed its employees despite my father's being in a union (joining a union was an implicit or explicit requirement, at least in the 70s and 80s). Aren't unions supposed to protect worker's rights? Well, as I discovered when Mom started working—and her job required joining a union, too—that's not true at all. Whatever the unions' noble intentions were at their start, they quickly morphed into predatory entities that protected incompetence and indolence while failing to promote merit. 

As I look back now at my own sneering attitude, though, I see clearly how Gen X I was being. My age cohort isn't known for decades-long loyalty to any company; we listened to the Boomer generation's Follow Your Bliss advice and took it seriously. And I also see now that CEO Park, while being an asshole, had the right idea: Dig a deep well. Anyone who succeeds will tell you that the formula is to pick a thing, then plug away at it relentlessly. This means effort, focus, discipline, and dedication—not flightiness and zigzagginess.

So because I'm feeling a bit depressed this weekend for the above reasons, I'm going to drown my sorrows in hot dogs. Last night, it occurred to me that I could go downstairs and buy meat to grind for chili dogs, so I'm about to go shop for some meat. I'll grind the meat today, chop my dill pickles into relish, eat regular hot dogs with carnivore buns, then make chili and have chili dogs with the rest of my dogs tomorrow. It won't solve my unemployment situation, but it'll temporarily alleviate the depression. Then starting Monday, back to the damn grind.

The grind. See, that's the funny thing: All of this time, since the beginning of 2025, I've remained extremely busy. I started off by learning some new video/photography skills through Skillshare. Then I got onto Substack, where I had vainly hoped to "break out" as a writer. On Substack up to now, I've produced massive amounts of (utterly unappreciated) material, and I've been diving deep into writing projects that I had put off for years, one of which is my series of movie-review books. I haven't moved the needle at all on Substack; I did, however, get an initial and fairly committed group of free subscribers (some of whom may be bots), plus a very small handful of paying subscribers. And I haven't broken out beyond that. But I'm trying. And trying. Maybe something will come of all this.

And maybe that's the "deep well" that I've been at pains to dig all of these years. I've always been a writer, and I've long been an educator. While I'd like to think I've improved over the years, I am, unfortunately, still too mediocre to break free of the Don't quit your day job! cohort, but I'm going to keep plugging away at my projects until I finally keel over, shit myself, and get found only when the neighbors complain about my smell. In the meantime, I have a parachute in the form of hagweon work. If I hear nothing from any university by mid-July, I'll look up local hagweons (of which there are plenty in my area) and get a part-time job at one, thus following my boss's template, but without having a family to feed and a hellaciously expensive apartment to pay for. And I'll play things by ear from there.

__________

*Your quick glossary:
UNIST = Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology, known for tech
SCH = Soonchunhyang University, known for medicine, in Asan, about 90 km south of Seoul
Hanyang = Hanyang YK Intercollege, known for interdisciplinary work, in Seoul
KNU = Kyungpook National University, known for agricultural science, in Sangju

I can relate

Since at least 2010, when Mom died, I've tried not to be like my father—a liar, a coward, and an idiot. I don't think I've succeeded, and I think the seeds of my dad's character lie within me. So yeah, there's some self-loathing on my part, and I despise these traits when they pop up in others: a tendency to avoid reality by constantly distorting it and reinterpreting it instead of aiming for hard-nosed, scientific empiricism; a desire to be liked and to ingratiate oneself with whatever crowd one is hanging with at the time, even if this means sounding conservative when you're really a liberal or vice versa (also known as getting along to go along); being evasive and passive-aggressive instead of being open and honest about what one does and doesn't want to do; a tendency to make the same mistakes and to commit the same sins over and over and over, never once learning anything; weakness and neediness and lack of self-discipline; spinelessness, lack of courage, and lack of intelligence.

But I know I've done idiotic things, and that I've been a moral coward in situations that called for backbone and conviction. As Dr. House likes to say, Everybody lies, and I've done my share of lying, too. So without getting too specific, I've been a liar, a coward, and an idiot myself. The apple didn't fall far from the tree. I'm not saying that the sum of who I am is defined by my father's faults, but I can't deny that those faults, and others, exist in me.

love, Larry Correia

trolling George

troo dat

practical and CG effects

frustration update

Amazon KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing, for ebooks and paperbacks) isn't even letting me upload my revised manuscript right now, so I'm going to cool off for a bit.

I had ordered a hard copy of my book, which arrived yesterday, as you saw. Everything looked great, but I did find one, and then two, little mistakes. The newest manuscript—the one I currently can't upload—contains corrections for those mistakes. The whole thing is very frustrating. Normally, uploading a manuscript is a fairly straightforward process. But something is glitching right now, so I'll have to just calm down and figure out what to do.

Dave Cullen on franchise challenges

Star Wars, Star Trek, DCU, MCU, and Doctor Who. Is there anything left after the woke cancer? Personally, I doubt it.

it's just a game

and what a surname to boot

Comment I saw: "They replaced beauty with the feral kid from the Mad Max movie."

please hold off on buying the paperback

The ms of the paperback version of Sights, Sounds, Words, my movie-review book, had one single mistake in it when I did a review after coming back from my walk. But when I corrected the mistake in MS Word, saved the file as a PDF, and reuploaded the PDF to Amazon, there were suddenly tons of formatting errors as text spilled over "bleed" lines. I'm in the midst of making changes, and this might take a while, so in the meantime, please do not try to buy the paperback version of my book.

The ebook version, by contrast, was corrected and reuploaded with no hitch that I could see. If you've already bought the ebook version, the updates to the manuscript will appear automatically in your ebook... unless something disastrous occurred, and we're all about to find out what that might be.

For the moment, though, I'm cross-eyed with fatigue, so I'm gonna take a nap. I've been running on less than an hour's sleep, and it's no use trying to work on manuscript formatting when you're dead tired. I think an hour or two in bed ought to solve the problem. Stay tuned.

today's walk (3:45 a.m. start)

Let's just get right into this morning's 10K walk. I was out of the building at 3:45 a.m.

3:53 a.m.—walking for eight minutes and now going up the footbridge ramp

3:55 a.m. The electric light show turned off before midnight.

Looking southeast. Lotte World Tower looms in the distance.

This part of the top of the berm parallels this on-ramp/off-ramp above me.

4:09 a.m.—down at creek level

Tan-cheon to the right; the narrow ramp above me is almost complete after years of construction.

4:26 a.m.—burd, just chillin'

As bright as the above photo looks, it was actually still pretty dark.

Here, too, the camera picks up way more light than my eyes do. But dawn is here. 4:33 a.m.

Samseong Bridge (Samseong-gyo)

I've jumped away from the walking path next to the bikers so I can enjoy my alone time by walking the long parking lot that parallels the creek. There are occasional walkers and bikers here, but very few.

I get a Mines of Moria vibe whenever I walk this section. Thanks, Peter Jackson.

Sunrise will happen soon to the northeast (on the left in this photo).

old guy sitting where I wanted to sit, close to the U-turn point

U-turn point, 4:50 a.m.

turning around, walking back, almost at my chosen rest stop

I didn't have any angina today, but as I get older, I've been giving myself more rest breaks.

vaguely nigiri-shaped benches

This is where I decided to sit for 15 minutes. I always set my cell phone's timer.

the wastebasket cum cigarette-butt-tossing place

man walks by giant thigh bone

neverending construction

This part of the parking lot is too crowded with construction equipment and activity for parking.

The fences all say 안전재일/anjeon jaeil, or "safety first."

This dude was here very, very early compared to his tardy mates.

5:19 a.m. and fully daytime, but the marauding sun isn't shining its rays at me directly yet.

Lotte World Tower greets the dawn.

Today, I decided to become a crack addict.

Step on a crack, break your mother's back! Step on a line, break your mother's spine!

See the buses in the distance? The lot was full of them when I'd passed by on my way to the river.

Above, only two buses remain to stand guard.

5:32 a.m. I wonder if this is the same bird I'd seen an hour earlier (4:26 a.m.).

burd, in context

surprisingly un-skittish

and a surprisingly un-skittish magpie (ggachi/까치 in Korean)

It decided to show me its better side.

When I loomed over to take this shot, the caterpillar stopped, either posing or accepting that I might squish it.

I don't squish insects anymore. I've developed a superstition that the bad karma affects my angina. So I stopped randomly killing tiny creatures years ago.

planter boxes that I pass all the time and never photograph

"No unauthorized use of this route" or something like that.

safety rules for bridge inspectors

the fat pylon where those signs are located

along the top of the final berm before the footbridge back to my neighborhood

some kind of top/bottom-diagram chart, maybe for record-keeping of damage and repair of the bridge...?

the fence that has always blocked my view of whatever lies down the slope of the berm

Today, I used my phone camera to have a peek. Parking lot. For garbage trucks?

The garbage trucks I normally see in Seoul aren't white. I wonder if these are really garbage trucks. Maybe they haul cut branches and grass clippings and other plant debris.

The Rexa Gang leaves its tag!

Yeah!

The sun! It burns!

The longer-established DOEZN Gang, which can't seem to spell "dozen." (DOEZMY...?)

a tower, towering

a biker passes me

another DOEZN Gang tag

guardian cat, also unwontedly un-skittish

the other guardian, maybe waiting for a can of tuna

the two cats in context

looking ready to go somewhere but not moving

the quiet chaos under the bridge

yet another DOEZN tag

getting close to the footbridge

the benches near the footbridge where I rest for five minutes when I'm feeling chest pains

the footbridge and one of the ramps up

a less obstructed view

6:05 a.m. Contrast this with the previous photo at 3:55 a.m.

Don't fall through that hole.

the ramp down, my building in the distance

the final, shaded stretch

the white gaura

yellow Asiatic lily

If I have a daughter, I'm naming her Yellow Asiatic Lily. What, is that a problem?

6:20 a.m.—at my building

So... 3:45 a.m. to 6:20 a.m. = 2 hours and 35 minutes. Take away 18 minutes (15 minutes' rest + 3 minutes stopping and shutterbugging along the way), and that's 2 hours, 17 minutes. For 10K, that makes my speed 4.37 kph, which is positively vigorous by my pitiful standards (these days, I'm happy to range between 3.8 and 4.1 kph).

But I'm still getting hit by the sun even when leaving at 3:45 a.m. So I might have to pull a Jeff Hodges and wake up at 2:30 a.m. so I can end the walk before sunrise.

This become much less of an issue in the fall and winter, of course. At that time of year, sunrise happens significantly later, and ambient temps are much lower, making direct sunlight more tolerable. But Korean summer is what it is.

Huh... I just noticed that my building has a tax office. I didn't earn any income last year (unless you count the less-than-$100 I've earned through Substack and self-publication), so I'm not bothering with taxes this year.

Right, well, that's this morning's walk. Much cooler than the previous one. This week, I'm walking only MWF, with no walking over the weekend. On Saturday, I'm going to try to make carnivore hot-dog buns so I can eat some dang dawgs. That reminds me: I need to buy dill pickles to chop into relish. No ketchup, but I do have sriracha. And mustard. The 'tard.