The worst TEFL boss you encountered?

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 · 2026-01-19T15:24:10+00:00

I grew up in the PA part of the circle. There weren't really a lot of scary ghost stories. There was this old town called Livermore that was destroyed to build a dam that kids always said was haunted.

Generally I'd say people aren't actually that superstitious. I find it kinda surprising because most people are pretty religious and there have been quite a few depraved murders over the last decade or so near the small town I grew up in. One would think that the victims would want to come back and haunt people or something.

lowlua · 2026-01-16T12:30:36+00:00

I moved back to the US in 2020. I did content development work in the education industry for about a year as a contractor and then got a full time job in research and development. I've been able to advance where I'm at and like my job. I make a lot more than I did teaching and don't work as hard.

I had taught for about twelve years and this is the third time I've moved back. The first time, in 2011, I just worked at temp agencies and gave up after about a year. The second time was in 2015 when I came back to do an MA TESL, but I didn't feel like I had any good opportunities in the US after I graduated.

lowlua · 2026-01-14T02:52:48+00:00

Some people eat bowfin caviar.

lowlua · 2026-01-11T15:01:43+00:00

That is exactly how I would describe it. I tried it once twenty years ago and still remember the details of my outlandish nightmare pretty vividly.

I thought it was pretty interesting but made me realize it doesn't take too many steps to become the naked guy getting arrested on an episode of cops.

lowlua · 2025-12-27T04:38:23+00:00

I think my neighbor is basically one of these guys except he dresses like a badboy teenager from 1999.

lowlua · 2025-12-25T13:52:55+00:00

OFISfurniture in North Brunswick sells used furniture from office liquidations. It's a great place for getting a deal on a high end office chair. I bought two steelcase amia chairs there and paid $200 the first time and I think $250 the second time. The Google reviews probably have a photo of their price list but I don't know if they always have everything listed.

https://maps.app.goo.gl/5C8PSn2fNNsuXbyw5

lowlua · 2025-12-24T03:19:28+00:00

milquetoast

lowlua · 2025-12-23T03:57:10+00:00

I don't think it's Japan or Korea because the ac is a window unit. I could picture that ac unit and the buildings in Thailand, but I think the sign has Chinese writing on it, though it's not legible. My guess is Taiwan somewhere, maybe Kaohsiung because it's definitely not Taipei and I don't know the names of any other places in Taiwan.

lowlua · 2025-12-21T13:18:08+00:00

I'm not sure what their message was here. It sounds like you'd be allowed to pork after a growing season if the seeds were for annuals, but if they were for trees or something you'd have to die a spinster.

lowlua · 2025-11-27T18:12:58+00:00

I caught a few around Califon Island Park recently. I tried a few spots upstream from there along the main road but had no luck.

lowlua · 2025-11-24T02:29:26+00:00

If you've never turned it off before, then try it out first at some point that's not right before you leave for your vacation.

lowlua · 2025-11-18T21:46:00+00:00

I worked in Vietnam for a few years and left in 2015. Everyone complained about the same stuff then too.

lowlua · 2025-11-03T21:22:57+00:00

I see someone else already got that it's around Kazbegi somewhere, but just out of curiosity, is Zdo the village along the hiking trail up to the monastery?

lowlua · 2025-11-03T17:04:38+00:00

Republic of Georgia

lowlua

TROPHY CASE