In the Search of a New Apartment: Slumlords Edition

While searching for apartments, if you do some persistent googling you may be able to find recent pics of the property like these, without ever having to come on site for inspection:

It turns out that the "all included" apartment with a surprisingly cheap rent is part of a big residential block under investigation by the municipality for years due to numerous unfixed complaints from the tenants. Broken pipes, vermins, garbage regulation problem, humidity, mold, unresponsive management (who has been changed once or twice) who won't do timely repairs. It has made appearance in lots of news sources, which doesn't come up on the first few pages of search of the address. That's when knowing the actual name of the residential building comes in handy. I've also heard bad things about the management company on reddit.

Of all the things I'm afraid of, landlords who won't do repairs or extermination is without a doubt at the top of the list. Bed bugs, roaches, mices, stuff of horror. Broken toilet. Dirty water. Soundproof is also on the list of many people, but I've not experienced a thin wall problem, so I've never thought of it. Inadequate heating is also awful for obvious reason.

Castlevania Order of Ecclesia - All Glyphs

Guest Wear to a Graduation

What If One Day

You wake up and realize you're the exact carbon copy of one of your parents, and you'll be the exact same when you're their age. From physical stature, intellect, personality, dress style, judgment to tendency. Can one really escape it?

Hourly Pay Cheque for Your Suffering

Ever feel like you should be paid for your emotional and physical pain. For example, if you're having chronic pain 24/7, at least by minimum wage you should have hundreds of dollars a day for the trouble. Plus who's to say you only deserve minimum wage for that shit?

Here's a Thought

What if you get bed bugs from going to the cinema? Any couch or cushion is a risk.

Best Episodes of Six Flying Dragons

Episode 15
Episode 25 (blood bath)
Episode 29
Episodes 35 & 36 (historical assasination)
Episodes 47 & 48 (historical Strife of Princes)
Episode 50 (finale)

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Of the 6 "dragons", there are 3 historical figures and 3 fictional. The ones who existed in real life are:
- General Yi Seong Gye, later King Taejo of Joseon
- Yi Bang Won, Yi Seong Gye's 5th son, later King Taejong of Joseon (known in history as being ruthless to his political enemies but a good ruler)
- Jeong Do Jeon, prime minister who came into conflict with Yi Bang Won over their political system ideal. JDJ wanted constitutional monarchy, while YBW wanted absolute monarchy. This was in the 14th century.

Six Flying Dragons

I love the characterization in this drama. Everyone has a backstory, motive, and conflicting sides in them, that make for great storytelling. The fights are so spare and require such a long buildup with political intrigues that when they happen it's so epic. It's nowhere as tense when you're just viewing these fight scenes out of context, though the cinematography is still pretty good.

By good I mean amazing:

50 episodes is still overkill, but starting from ep 15 the pace has picked up considerably.

I'm also partial to Moo Hyul who is just like a character straight out of a Japanese cartoon and who serves as a comic relief most of the time but is shaping up to become the great warrior in the sequel Deep Rooted Tree.

Shiba Inu (Doge)

Misaeng Ep 2 Recap

Misaeng (Incomplete Life) continues to manage to make the viewers cry and laugh right after or at the same time with very daily and common situations.

Geu Rae's day 3 accomplishment

• Got Young Yi to tie his tie for him (but not on him, unlike he shyly expected). Sadly he had to wear the old suit and carry the new suit with squid juice in a bag as he didn't go home last night.
• Stayed up all night at the office to re-organize the files Manager Oh gave him and slept at the sauna.
• Assistant Manager Dongshik couldn't stop wowing at how he organized all the files and folders. Still, when Geu Rae came he told him he was not the only person working here and that he should read the company's manual and understand the standard for organizing and formatting files.
• Manager Oh acted unimpressed and told him "At least your quantity is proven."
• It turned out that Geu Rae was also good with Excel, which got some work done.

The final interview

• Everyone kept hint dropping Geu Rae that "you can't work alone" meanwhile he felt lost and left out. Turned out interns needed to form a team of 2 to give presentations for the final interview. 
• No one wanted to partner with Young Yi because she was the ace and would overshadow them.
• (Un)surprisingly, suddenly intern after intern started to approach Geu Rae to give him lots of teas and snacks and ask him nicely to be their partner.
• Baek Gi stopped by, commented on Geu Rae's pile of gifts and gave him a thumb up.
• Meanwhile, Young Yi looked at the hair tie Geu Rae gave back to her and thought to ask him to be her partner.
• A.M. Dongshik finally pulled Geu Rae aside and told him why he was so sought after: because he lacked confidence and competence, which would make his partner look good.
• Geu Rae sat quietly and thought about the time when he finished part-time work at dawn and walked alone home in the opposite direction to the crowd of people who went to school and work in the morning. He never felt like he belonged.
• Dejectedly, he walked out of the meeting room to a group of interns who walked past him with phony smiles and hopeful eyes that he'd be their partner.

Characters

• Manager Oh of Sales Team 3 seemed to have his own problems as he seemed to refuse playing office politics. When the Head of the Department suggested he could get the Executive Director to have dinner and hike together with them, Oh found an excuse to not join. Department Chief asked, "Even when I try to help, why do you refuse?" Later it was discovered that it was the Executive Director who placed Geu Rae, someone without qualifications, in Oh's team.
• Manager of Sales Team 2, a close friend with Manager Oh, wondered why the Executive Director placed Geu Rae into Oh's team, commenting that even if the E.D. hated Oh he wouldn't be as immature as wanting to sabotage him.
• Sales Team 2 intern, a married guy with a child so he had to stay up late, constantly making mistakes and getting scolded as a result. The intern who was actually nice to Geu Rae by telling him there was space in the elevator in ep 1. In this ep he unintentionally caused problem to Geu Rae simply by the act of borrowing a glue stick. 
• Seok Yool, slimy intern of textile department 2, with 50/50 parted hair and overfriendly laugh, presented himself to Geu Rae and asked to be his partner for the presentation. Jaded, Geu Rae asked him the explain his reasons, but walked away in the middle of it, leaving Seok Yool stunned then comically bursted out laughing to himself due to the disappointment.

Misunderstanding and Resolve

• Heartbroken after knowing the other interns only wanted to use him, possibly including Young Yi, Geu Rae was leaving for the elevator when Manager Oh followed in and asked where he was going during working hours. Geu Rae then directly asked Manager Oh to mentor him, because he had always been alone and being alone he would not accomplish anything.
• Manager told Geu Rae how lucky he was that he could even get an internship without any qualification and that he disliked a world where connections settled everything.
• Sales Team 2 intern caused a big misunderstanding leading to Geu Rae being yelled at and punished. After asking to borrow a glue stick, he stood at Geu Rae's desk which was full of old confidential documents which needed to be shredded, and inadvertently attached one of them to his own papers, then dropped the confidential paper in the lobby. The Executive Director picked up this paper with Sales Team 3 name on it, and brought to Manager Oh. Manager Oh yelled at Geu Rae to "Get out" and asked if Geu Rae now understood why he was called unqualified and why he wouldn't help him.
• Sales Team 2 won a big contract and celebrated. The intern was praised. Meanwhile Manager Oh looked at the paper picked up in the lobby again, and saw the Sales Team 2 intern's name accidentally imprinted on it when he glued his paper on top earlier. Manager Oh took a smoke with Sales Team 2 Manager on the rooftop, attempting to confront him, but upon learning that Team 2's intern was a newlywed and had to marry young because he was the oldest son in the family, Manager Oh decided not to pursue the matter. He put the evidence in the shredder.
• Feeling guilty for wrongly blaming Geu Rae, Manager Oh took him and A.M. Dongshik to an afterwork dinner and drank himself silly. During the drunken ranting, Manager Oh praised Geu Rae's organizing skill, saying it was even better than the method in the company's manual. Then he said the document problem earlier wasn't Geu Rae's fault, but when asked who else could have done it, he answered in a high pitched voice, "that a seeecreeet" before falling down his seat. Then he proceeded to have a drunken argument with Sales Team 2 Manager about the goddamn glue stick.
• Geu Rae went home and silently cried when remembering how Manager Oh called him "our kid". Now he felt like he belonged.
• The next day, intentionally or not, Geu Rae didn't hear Young Yi's call when he confidently walked into the elevator. He met up with Seok Yook the half parted hair textile intern and agreed to be his partner.

Thoughts

The moment Geu Rae sat alone musing about how he never belonged reminds me of the time when I made mistakes at work then sat down thinking I'd never make it because of my chronic pain. I had such thoughts like I was always alone, nobody gave a damn, everyone moved on with their life while I was the only person to think about it over and over, nobody would say sorry to me, and I would never get my compensation. In fact right now I have this on my phone and desktop:

It might seem like I'm angsting, but at this moment I'm not.

Misaeng Ep 1 Recap

"Misaeng is a highly realistic, depressing drama without any tragic happening."

It details the ups and downs in a person's work life. From dealing with discrimination of academic background and sexism to navigating company policies and bosses who have frequent power trips and who only care for their own promotion.

Main Character

• Jang Geu Rae: former Go player trained since young, he excelled at the game but had to quit due to his father's untimely death. Since then, he worked various minimum wage jobs (supermarket clerk, cleaning the sauna, cab driving for drunk people, food delivery). His mom got him an internship at an international company thanks to connection. Upon knowing Geu Rae only had a GED, all the other interns shunned him and his superiors did not expect much from him.

Difficulties Geu Rae faced in ep 1

• Ill-fitted suit. He had to wear his father's old suit. His mom tried to save to get him a more decent one.
• Assigned to Team 3 Sales, met Assistant Manager of team 3 (Dongshik) who asked him what he'd done in his 26 years of life without attaining any diploma or competency. Geu Rae stayed silent.
• A.M. Dongshik was busy with phone calls and documents while Geu Rae awkwardly sat down then stood up and walked around not knowing what to do.
• Finally given the task of photocopying some documents, he mistook the scanner for the photocopier.
• Copier ran out of paper. The drawer was also out of paper. Not knowing what was where. Not knowing how to load paper or copy multiple pages at a time. Dropped tons of paper to the floor.
• Picked up phone call asking to speak to Manager and he had no idea who he was, where he was and when he would come back, because nobody told him (no orientation or training, Geu Rae started 10 days later than other interns).
• Picked up phone call in Russian and couldn't respond. Picked up another phone call in English and didn't understand. And on. Luckily, another intern was nearby and he had to bother her again and again with those phone calls.

New characters

• Ace Intern, Ahn Young Yi, who was admired by everyone and could speak English and Russian perfectly. She had to come back and forth between her own duties and answering phone calls for Geu Rae. Finally fed up, she told him to tell anyone calling that none of his team was present and to write down a note. If foreigners called, simply hang up. When Geu Rae approached her again (to give back the hair tie she dropped), she mistook it as an invite to lunch, and before he could speak promptly told him she usually ate alone. Later, though, she walked by his desk and asked why he didn't go to lunch, then asked if he was a mama boy who couldn't do anything by himself. Geu Rae then answered "I'm not stupid", it was only because he was not hungry. But then his stomach growled loudly and Young Yi simply walked away.
• Jang Baek Gi, who seemed to be an over-achiever, perfectionist and ambitious intern. He paid attention to things like unique fonts and format, and anticipated all of his superiors' needs like bringing coffee and reserving restaurants before asked, greatly impressing them. Everyone was gossiping about Geu Rae the new intern who got in through nepotism, and Baek Gi listened with interest but with a neutral hard to decipher expression. He then introduced himself and shook Geu Rae's hand with a polite smile, offering to help when needed with things like photocopying and commenting that Geu Rae could make himself comfortable like everyone else and take off his blazer.

Social life woe

• Geu Rae tried to take the elevator to go to the cafeteria, but it was pack full of other interns. One nicely invited him in to a small space left, but another blocked him and said it was full.
• Baek Gi was in the middle of the interns and looked at Geu Rae expressionlessly as the elevator door closed. Other interns smiled politely, but soon gossiped about his special treatment as he didn't take the intern test. They wondered if Geu Rae went to Ivy League or Harvard to have that special treatment.
• The interns ate together and were complaining about the unfair competition as Geu Rae passed by with his lunch tray. To the others' dismay, Baek Gi invited him to the table. Baek Gi then asked Geu Rae to join the interns' study group. It was clear at this point that Baek Gi's "nice" intention was to expose Geu Rae's academic background to the others as they started to ask what university he came from, and he told him he only had a GED. Everyone's faces turned stone cold.
• Young Yi arrived late at the cafeteria and joined Geu Rae as he sat and ate alone while the other guys already left. She apologized for being rude earlier (calling him mama's boy) and Geu Rae replied with "yeah" instead of "it's ok", which stunned her.
• Later during the day Geu Rae happened to hear the interns gossiping about him with the Assistant Manager of the Resource team (where Baek Gi was assigned). Baek Gi listened quietly as everyone complained. The Assistant Manager told them to be nice to Geu Rae since he wouldn't last long anyway.
• Geu Rae walked home silently thinking about all the talk he overheard. He blankly looked around his room, then picked up his Go pieces and threw them into the drawer, remembering his past when while praised for having exceptional talent, he kept failing to become a professional Go player because he was distracted with part-time jobs to support his family because his dad was ill.
• Flashback to when he was stocking goods in a grocery store when he received a call from mom, and the scene switched to him kneeling silently at his father's funeral while his mom cried audibly. Geu Rae quietly thought to himself: "My journey... ends here." Still, he blamed himself for not having enough effort.

Geu Rae's solution

• Geu Rae arrived early at work and saw a list of names and contact infos. He soon memorized them and was able to quickly make calls on Assistant Manager's demand, which stunned him.
• As team 3's Manager just returned from a business trip with bloodshot eyes and was still stuck in traffic and the A.Manager had to go on a trip of his own, Geu Rae was sent to meet a foreign client. The A.M. thought their team was doomed because "this kid doesn't know anything"
• Manager arrived at the cafe to see the client happy and occupied because Geu Rae taught him to play Go during the wait.
• Still, Manager told Geu Rae he couldn't accept him because of poor qualification. Geu Rae said he was a hard worker upon being asked to sell himself. Manager said it wasn't enough. Geu Rae said his work had better quality... and quantity (didn't know what else to say). Manager gave him a task of classifying documents to test his work quality.
• Geu Rae used his childhood method of classifying Go articles to classify the documents Manager gave him.
• Meanwhile, Geu Rae's mom spent a fortune of her savings on buying him a nice suit. She immediately went to meet him in his company lobby.
• Geu Rae put on his new suit in the washroom and sniffed back his tears with a smile.
• Manager saw Geu Rae's work on classifying different files into folders and asked if he had friends. 
• Manager also walked by Young Yi's department (textile) earlier and eagerly asked her to work for his team after internship.

Day 2 problem

• At a factory, squids were mixed up with baby octopus and thus would cause quality problem for their dry products.
• Interns were assembled to go to the factory and manually separate the baby octopus from the squids. They complained that this was dirty work and that someone else should do it, while eyeing Geu Rae, who was sitting in the same room with his new suit.
• (In)conveniently, there was no protective factory clothing left for Geu Rae to cover himself, so he went into a freezing truck of seafood with his new suit. No intern wanted to partner with him either.
• Despite being portrayed as having taken numerous part-time job, Geu Rae seemed slow. Viewers pointed out that he could've asked for trash bag/plastic bag to make a poncho and cover himself.
• Geu Rae managed to find an octopus in a container as his phone rang. His gloved hand slipped and dropped the phone into the container of squid and liquid.
• Baek Gi then got a phone call and was told that the Chinese exporter accepted their fault and that the interns no longer had to separate octopus and squid. Slyly he told another intern who clearly hated Geu Rae to inform Geu Rae to stop working and come back with them. Asshole interns left after making a faint call to Geu Rae which he couldn't hear while still working hard with the squid container.
• Geu Rae stayed in the truck late until the factory worker came to tell him the others all left. He came back to the office drenched in squid juice. All the workers already left since it was late, but Young Yi was just leaving. She gave him her phone to speak to the other interns who were relaxing at a Korean sauna. They asked why he didn't pick up his phones, laughs audible in the background.
• Still Geu Rae came to the afterwork dinner and met the other interns without washing. He stood stoically while they made fun of him and his smell. Then told Manager he was going to return to the office to finish the classifying work he received. He walked away telling himself, "I'm abandoned because I don't work hard enough."

Thoughts

People like the interns are everywhere. One could say that it's almost normal, as heartbreaking as it is. Once when I came to a restaurant asking for work, I was given a trial shift. A waitress was told to show me what to do. She told me to clean the toilet with only my hands and gloves and said that was how they did it there. Then when I asked her about dining table numbers she told me there was no number. It came back to bite her in the ass when I directly asked the boss if there was really no numbers for tables, which was fucking impossible. I bussed tables before. Then, the boss hired me and let someone else trained me. They were full of praise, to my surprise. 

Being played like that was my biggest fear. In my first job when I bussed tables the boss constantly told me to come on days when the restaurant was closed. To be fair, it was holidays but I was oblivious and didn't check the calendar. I came to be a paranoid person, always afraid of being played, which was why I dealt a little better with the waitress bitch. Still, I constantly was called naive and not aware whenever I was played. The truth was, I was completely aware, but I started to "kill them with kindness." For a while, I got everyone to reciprocate, begrudgingly or not, and I usually indirectly expose their deeds in front of others. But my social capacity had its limit and soon weirder problems arose like someone thought I was a manipulative user. It was unintentional and I genuinely liked him, but due to the misunderstanding I was uncomfortable and quit after working for about half a year. My chronic pain also caused underperformance, but it's something I can never explain to anyone.

Castlevania Order of Ecclesia Fresh Hard Mode Lv1 Cap...

... is like my supervisor bitch at work.

(Why do I call her a bitch? Because everyone else does.)

Fresh hard mode lv1 cap makes everything extra difficult. The zombies that normally take 1 Secare hit, now take 2, because you're stuck at lv1 forever and your strength will not increase. Adding to that, you have limited MP to perform actions. A few weapon swing and the bar is depleted, thus you can only frantically jump to avoid enemies. But then, a bone-throwing skeleton appears and blocks your jump with a bone that can hit for half of your HP bar. You dodge the piece of bone and try to jump over the skeleton, but it either throws another or it jumps itself backward and you'll land on it with half of your HP damaged. Behind you, horde of zombies appear from the ground. It's risky to slide backward, and you must watch your step if you go forward, as they can also randomly rise from the ground right in front of you.

How does this relate to the bitch? She makes everyone's life difficult. Nothing is ever right and you're always at fault even if you're not. A simple act of placing a bottle on a table can lead to her firing her mouth off at how you're placing it too far to the left, then when you replace it to the right it will be too far right, and when you put it in the center it will be too center. When her assistant does his work at their station, she'll send him to the back, but when he's in the back, she'll make him go back to the station, all while talking her nasty mouth off. The worst, is when she has no idea what she is saying, but you're still wrong. She does not know how to use a tool, but she'll yell off at you about how to use it the right way. That is, I assume, something that makes her feel powerful and important in her nasty life. Holy fuck, she never shuts up and everyone complains about having a headache around her (it's so hard for me to stay neutral and not join the discussion, but I'm also wary around these people). She will also try to dig up your secrets to hold power over you. Someone warned me before, that if you don't gossip with her she'll make your life even more difficult, so there's no winning.

Just nasty.

Though Castlevania is still fun. I've built up my patience and concentration for this game.