He aquí los pensamientos aleatorios de un epistemólogo andante.

I dream of a world where chickens can cross the road without having their motives questioned.

피할수 없는 고통이라면 차라리 즐겨라

As of June, 2013, I have assumed a new identity: I am a cancer survivor. "Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose."

"A blog, in the end, is really not so different from an inscription on a bone: I was here, it declares to no one in particular. Don't forget that." - Justin E. H. Smith

재미없으면 보상해드립니다!

"All things are enchained with one another, bound together by love." - Nietzsche (really!)

Leviticus 19:33-34

Donc, si Dieu existait, il n’y aurait pour lui qu’un seul moyen de servir la liberté humaine, ce serait de cesser d’exister. - Mikhail Bakunin

Solvitur ambulando.

"Sometimes I wonder why I even bother to soliloquize. Where was I?" - the villain Heinz Doofenshmirtz, in the cartoon Phineas and Ferb.

Is seer periculeus voor de onbekende, om aan te doen. - Hendrick Hamel

"Do unto others 20% better than you would expect them to do unto you, to correct for subjective error." - Linus Pauling

Blogging online since 1965

Recent Posts

Who Is Jared?

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

Categories

My Life Online

  • Like most people, I spend a lot of time online, although I try to limit it somewhat. Here is a somewhat-annotated list of the "places" where I spend time online.
    - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
  • Knowledge and News
  • "Social Media"
    • I don't really "do" social media. I have a membership at Facebookland but I never log in there. I don't like it.
    • I have a membership at The Youtubes but I mostly use it for work. I also listen to music on youtube, frequently - I prefer it to typical streaming services, for example.
  • Humor and Cat Videos
  • A Diversity of Blogs - I read these a lot.
  • Blogs of people I actually know
  • Geofiction - this has evolved into a significant "hobby" for me. I like to draw imaginary maps, and there is a website that has enabled this vice.
    • I worked as a volunteer administrator for the site OpenGeofiction on and off for a few years. I created (but no longer maintain) the site's main wiki page: OGF Wiki. I am not currently working as administrator but I remain active on the site.
    • The above work has required my becoming an expert in the Openstreetmap system. Openstreetmap is an attempt do for online maps what wikipedia has done for encyclopedias. I have considered becoming an openstreetmap contributor, but I feel that my current location in Korea hinders that, since I don't have a good grasp Korean cartographic naming conventions.
    • Starting in April, 2018, I decided somewhat capriciously to build my own "OGF stack" on my own server. This was not because I intended to abandon the OGF site, but rather because I wanted to better understand the whole architecture and all its parts. I built a wiki on the Mediawiki platform (the same as wikipedia). This wiki has no content. I built a map tileserver and geospatial database, which contains a very low resolution upload of an imaginary planet called Rahet. And I built a wordpress blog, which is a separate, low-frequency blog intended to focus on my geofictional pursuits rather than this more personalized, general purpose blog. All of these things can be found integrated together on my rent-a-server, here: geofictician.net
  • TEFL - my "profession," such as it is.

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« Caveat: A Banal Declaration of Lesser Banality | Main | Caveat: Right Turn Clyde »

2012.08.16

Caveat: tl;dr

As-tl-drtl;dr is a txt-speak abbreviation that means: "too long; didn't read." It's what you write in response to a facebook post or blog post or email that wasn't worth your time to consume.

During my recent visit in the US, I had a conversation with a person very close to me whom I shall not name, who essentially said this was why my blog was pointless and useless as a means of keeping those close to me up-to-date about what was going on in my life. My posts are either utterly impersonal, or they end up in the "tl;dr" category.

I suppose so. To be utterly frank, I didn't really have a great visit back to the US, this time around. There were highlights, seeing people I care about. But ... I got a lot of what I can only say is dismissive or frustrated feedback over my choice to transform what was intended to be an "adventure" into a lifestyle choice. Sigh.

Am I making a mistake, staying in Korea? If I were a good Confucian (which is not, by the way, my ambition - I'm just saying), I would return to the US, to be closer and more accessible to my family, so that I could "do right" by them. Instead, I camp out half-a-planet away, doing my own thing. Yes, it's personally fulfilling. Yes, it's what I want to do. But under a good Confucian, filial-duty ethic, it's wrong.

Wow, that got deep fast. Ooops. I just meant to write about the tl;dr thing. And maybe I did: you can now respond, dear reader, with a succinct tl;dr. kthx bye.

Posted at 05:59 in Banalities & Journaling |

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Comments

Heh, and I thought you'd be writing about omitting "Atlas Shrugged" from your library. This was a more interesting post. You have my sympathy about family and friends' reaction to living your one and only life as you see fit. And I think there might be an argument made for communication and transportation technology decreasing the obligation to be geographically closer to family to fulfill one's filial duty. Other philosophers would see more value in living an authentic life than staying in the same neighborhood, especially in our "global village." Write on, Jared. Oh, btw, I think even in abbreviation, telling someone that one can't be bothered reading a communication is more of an offense than moving away.

Posted by: BK | 2012.08.16 at 15:45

Hey, Jared!
Your posts are never "tl;dr" for me! I agree wholeheartedly with BK, above, and feel that anyone who truly loves you wants you to be true to your self. We strive to find the people or environments that bring out our best, or make us feel most authentic-- in doing so, we are able to give the best possible version of our self to the world: to our students, family, friends -- you name it. So, "to thine own self be true," and fie on anyone who doesn't like it!

Posted by: SRG | 2012.08.20 at 22:25

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