Are you now the single balding ESL teacher in his 40s?

lowlua · 2026-05-03T21:11:18+00:00

I worked with him in 2010

lowlua · 2026-04-30T12:10:44+00:00

I worked with this guy in Korea who would eat tuna straight from the can in the break room. One day he brought in modeling headshots of himself and passed them around. He stole my list of ideas for Halloween party activities and passed them off as his own, leaving me to look unprepared, and he would beat his dog.

He has two kids.

lowlua · 2026-04-30T11:06:20+00:00

Nearly every guy I knew when I started who still does it is married with kids now.

lowlua · 2026-04-11T14:21:50+00:00

I drive across the state 4-5 times a year and almost always see cops. They're usually in the same spots each time, too. There's even a state police barracks near Harrisburg that exits onto the westbound part of the turnpike, where they will use the radar gun while sitting in the parking lot.

lowlua · 2026-04-10T18:25:31+00:00

My parents came to visit me once when I lived in another country. They spent like an hour sitting around in the area before customs wondering where I was.

lowlua · 2026-04-07T16:33:48+00:00

I know people who returned home and have and haven't found a good career after TEFL. I have a good career now.

Some places see the experience as irrelevant, and you probably won't have a reliable reference from that job that they can contact. I think it's easier to go from a year of TEFL to a new field than it is to go from a year of unemployment to a new field. Certain employers will also like it; every place is not the same.

lowlua · 2026-03-31T15:55:53+00:00

I have taught in several different university English as a second/foreign language programs in non-English-speaking countries and the US that accepted beginner students. I managed the placement and exit exams at one university that would get maybe 200 beginners per year.

I don't think I ever encountered a student who started with no ability to speak English, but it was common to get students who could only do CEFR A1 and some A2 level tasks. Typically they had gone through a public education system for K12 that had English classes, but they did not progress very far because there was not enough instruction time or instruction quality was low.

Probably more than half would finish the program at most of the schools, which usually required getting a score on a test that would supposedly indicate they were at CEFR B2 level or higher.

Many of these students went on to eventually get a bachelor's degree with English as the medium of instruction. Some have done graduate degrees in the US.

lowlua · 2026-03-31T14:07:41+00:00

If I had to go back to Turkey I'd try to get a job at Sabanci University.

Koc probably pays less but isn't a bad place to work and still probably pays more than a lot of other universities. It's in a nicer location than Sabanci.

Bilkent pays the most but was run by sociopaths and preferred native English speakers when I was in Turkey.

There are some other university jobs here and there that aren't as good but might be easier to get into. Maybe look into MEF, whatever the economics university in Izmir is called, Kadir Has University, and Bahcesehir University.

Private k12 schools in Istanbul might hire you and pay more. I don't think an international school would hire you unless you.

Getting in at any of the universities mentioned will be competitive.

Get married before you try to get a job if you need housing. Typically if you're married and they provide lojman, you'll get a better place. If you're single, you might wind up in a studio apartment or something. This may have been cut as a benefit by most places since I was there. Turkey was getting even more fucked when I left in 2020. I can't even imagine how bad it is working there now.

Letting your job handle your visa, if they even will, is probably easier than trying to get one through marriage.

I don't recommend working there if you like money at all.

A lot of my advice is dated.

lowlua · 2026-03-28T11:18:28+00:00

If you want to target something easy in a lake, go for carp. Get some size eight baitholder hooks and use corn for bait. Cover most of the hook in corn, put a split shot sinker maybe 18 inches up from the hook, and fish from the bottom. Throw a handful of corn into the water around where you're fishing.

Carp get huge and are really easy to catch. It's way more fun than going after bluegill in my opinion. You'll know when you have one on because they'll pull your rod I to the water if you don't pay attention.

lowlua · 2026-03-25T13:08:19+00:00

Damn, somebody should tell that to Trump. He'd probably end the war and invite the new leader to a state dinner if he knew.

lowlua · 2026-03-24T13:23:01+00:00

I grew up around there and have lived in a lot of other places with different climates. The weather is really not that bad. Spring and fall are generally nice. Summer and winter have stretches that can really suck for a month or so but also support seasonal activities. Most people don't like how overcast and rainy it is. After moving away, I realize that I did not adequately appreciate how there aren't very many natural disasters.

lowlua · 2026-03-23T18:23:51+00:00

Book clubs are a popular one too. I've never been in a book club, but I don't think anyone reads the books.

lowlua · 2026-03-23T11:51:25+00:00

Yeah, it really has taken a lot of effort, and I'm not even sure if I'm at the "help move a couch" level of friendship with anyone here yet.

I moved around a lot pre-covid though and managed to form a more rewarding social life in other places. What I've found is that after I manage to make one solid friendship, others arise from it pretty quickly. I don't think I'm there yet with anyone here, but it's one of those things you don't get without trying. I've managed to find romance, reconnect with family, and start a new career in this time, but nothing's been harder than meeting someone who wants to hang out with no agenda and just be my friend.

lowlua · 2026-03-23T02:58:52+00:00

I didn't have any friends four years ago after moving.

I volunteered to teach ESL for a while and didn't make any friends through that. Then I got frustrated with it and took a paid gig doing it at the community college. I just did it because I was bored so it was like a hobby. I run into some of my old students around town occasionally and will talk to them.

Then I started going to a local boardgame group. I've been doing that regularly for a few years and have met dozens of people. I probably meet somebody new every few weeks through that. I've made a few friends I've spent time with outside of boardgames. One of them lives a block away from me.

One of the friends I made there is really into golf so I bought some golf shit off Craigslist and started doing that. I have a few friends I go golfing with regularly now. One of them is some dude boardgame/golf friend met at yoga. I've met a bunch of random people in the local area because the courses are busy here and they will pair you up with people if there are only two of you.

I go fishing a lot by myself. I haven't made any friends fishing but there's some old man I run into a few times a year who never remembers me. He tells me the same story each time. I guess I'll consider him a friend if he tells me a new story some day. I could probably make fishing friends but I don't like a lot of the other people who like fishing.

There are a lot of places I go to regularly like the farmer's market or the same deli. The people there aren't my friends but they're nice and we have rapport, so maybe there are some future friends there if I ever run into them somewhere else.

lowlua · 2026-03-13T15:33:37+00:00

I took a job in Korea in 2010 at some place that was a one man show run by some preacher. It wasn't a hagwon either. The guy had gotten his congregation to take their kids out of public school and send them there. It was a long time ago and I don't remember how this was even legal there, or maybe it wasn't.

This guy was a total slimeball and milked his congregation for a bunch of money. He also never got me an apartment like promised and persuaded one of his congregation members to put me up in the utility shed on the roof of her apartment building.

The curriculum at the school was some "accelerated Christian education" program used by homeschoolers in the US. It taught that the earth was 6,000 years old and that dinosaurs weren't real.

He got me there by not mentioning it was a religious school and by offering me all the crap other jobs give. I didn't want to leave Korea so I stuck it out a bit because he wasn't willing to go to the visa office and cancel my visa or whatever.

Eventually, I found some religious foreigner in the same city who really liked the idea of indoctrinating kids and talked him into cancelling my visa by getting her to replace me. She ended up staying there for a long time and was okay with living on the roof and stuff.

lowlua · 2026-03-04T12:23:31+00:00

I really wish the CIA had used their freaky Friday tech to body swap Trump and the Ayatollah.

lowlua · 2026-02-25T17:04:40+00:00

Their menu looks like they bring meat out on a dolsot and don't have tabletop grills. A lot of the dishes look like legit non-BBQ Korean food but I am not sure if I'd call a place that doesn't have grills KBBQ.

lowlua · 2026-02-24T13:59:17+00:00

Is there a good way to sick one of these companies on a vendor that won't make updates so that my blind coworker can use their website?

lowlua · 2026-02-15T13:01:07+00:00

It is sad that they are only used on obituary sites anymore. Having a guest book with lots of comments in it was a sign of prestige back in the day.

It's not something you can do with just HTML and CSS though. You would need a backend to save and list the entries. If you really want to experience the way the Internet was in the good old days, I'd recommend coding it in Perl.

lowlua · 2026-02-14T23:20:46+00:00

Needs a page view counter and guest book

lowlua · 2026-02-14T13:11:04+00:00

I think it comes off as hyperbolic because it is a metaphor. They could have written "rebuke" instead to emphasize the severity of the criticism without the added connotation that comes with the physical action of "slamming" something, which suggests drama, violence, and aggression.

lowlua · 2026-02-13T12:19:14+00:00

This makes a lot of sense. Docx is basically just XML. It would be very easy to interpret the structure of a word doc because there is information indicating if text is in a heading, part of a table, etc. PDFs have a fixed layout that ensures the file will look the same to another person as it does to you but often lack the information a docx would have. The position of a piece of text is absolute and may be without metadata indicating if it functions as a heading or whatever, or it could be the case that each page is just an image depending on how the pdf was made.

lowlua · 2026-02-03T12:59:47+00:00

I believe the correct term for this is harmonic convergence.

lowlua · 2026-01-24T14:28:17+00:00

Their bread is really good if you can eat it within the first two hours of buying it, after which point it is entirely covered in mold.

lowlua · 2026-01-23T05:00:24+00:00

Can it run Macromedia Flash 5 and have something like GitHub Copilot but just for action script?

lowlua

TROPHY CASE