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[soapver4]

A Stranger in the Lee Soo-Yeon Strangeverse

Merch idea: You're a vacationer in mystery mistress Lee Soo-yeon's macrohabitat, where each story so far begins with a lead character running into a corpse: in a store he shops at, at the home he visits for an appointment, along his commute, in a vehicle arriving at his workplace, and right above her on her vehicle. To enjoy your stay with maximal peace in this video game, you must keep the place as safe as possible:

Brave the embarrassment and stigma to report suspicious activities and domestic violence and other wrongdoings before they escalate or occur to more victims

Stop establishment patrons from taking any unconscious person away

Clean up after yourself so that no sign of carelessness or sloppiness suggests an abundance of easy victims to potential criminals

Join a mentoring program for at-risk youths

Join a neighborhood watch

Help out at a soup kitchen

Sign petitions for safer infrastructure and other robust security measures and for legal reforms to hold wrongdoers fully accountable

Pay all your rightful taxes to sustain a well-functioning justice system, including adequate hot spots policing (but with policy safeguards to forestall racial profiling)

Depending on the number of crimes accrued by the end of your stay, you get to collect rewards or penalties. There are two tiers of rewards: (A) a computer-generated, shareable gif of you slurping noodles with ace prosecutor Hwang Si-mok and warm-hearted police lieutenant Han Yeo-jin or having desserts with the dashing emergency medicine specialist and secret change-maker Ye Jin-woo and (B) shareable AI doodle of you in Han Yeo-jin's art style. The penalties? Computer-generated imagery of Lee Soo-yeon's villains cynically pointing weapons at your photo avatar. Sorry, you'll have to do more work to show off this other visual on social media. Naturally, the number of villains increases with the number of crimes.

A leaderboard publicizes all players' rankings. Every few months, active players have virtual access to a debate between socially-driven crime writers like Lee Soo-yeon and Kim Eun-hee and experts on criminal affairs. Physical attendance is possible with ticket purchase. The top 5% of players receive complimentary tickets. Let's keep in mind, though, that virtual virtue does not always translate to real-world virtue. Nonetheless, at a time when apocalyptic news ceaselessly rains down on us, the reminder that we have so much agency to sculpt our surroundings would be empowering, clarifying and inspiring.

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Slumber in Monochrome Botany

Element expansion idea: A rugby team — which includes their feisty female manager, a dainty boy assistant and hunky all-male players — walking through a pitch-dark forest during a total solar eclipse see on the reemergence of light that they are now effectively Lilliputian Gretel and Hansels surrounded by gingerbread houses in the form of plant photographer Karl Blossfeldt's strange monochrome fruits and by witches in the form of his entangled gray tendrils.

We see whimsical sequences of the players putting their footwork, strong grip and spatial awareness, all of which have earned them the top spot in the World Rugby Rankings in this unspecified year, to use to navigate the tricky terrain. The assistant, on the other hand, trips and rolls off a giant, hairy catsear leaf. The manager grabs hold of him but falls over herself while pulling the assistant up. A player then does the same to the manager but ends up falling with her. Manager and player walk around on clutches improvised from fragments of gigantic horsetails from now on.

As the days roll by and the exit to the transformed, maze-like forest remains nowhere in sight, the team half-jokes that they are really rugby board game figurines a bored Hermes, the scheming Greek god of athletics, has absentmindedly tossed into his backyard garden after amusing himself. Their long list of accolades in the outside world increasingly looks meaningless. That is not so bad as they are in this together. The male lead, not uncoincidentally the team's top player, grows terribly insecure, though. In the absence of statistics, the significance of his superior technical skills is disappearing. He is now just another guy on an abandoned, cursed team. In contrast, the manager's injury only highlights her capability more. Limping but ever radiating, she proves herself a wizard at problem solving even in such weird surroundings as she coordinates shelter construction, designs rainwater filtration structures and devises skin and mouth tests to gauge plant edibility. In so many ways, she is a gorgeous splash of color in this bleak place in the eyes of the entire team. What right does he have to remain paired with her as a power couple?

Worse, she seems distracted when they are together. The male lead does try to shake off his thoughts, reminding himself that perceptions triggered by his impostor syndrome are as much an illusion as the oversized plant parts they are lost among. To his utter horror, however, she freely admits in a heated confrontation that her heart is presently with someone else.

The enraged male lead presses her for the identity of that person, but the manager merely laughs that no outsider can truly understand the love between two people anyway. Burning with madness, the male lead starts to scrutinize everyone who is looking too blissful in the bizarre forest. Did the player on clutches and the manager fall in love with each other as they romantically fell over the catsear leaf together? Or maybe he underestimated the dainty assistant. Maybe the assistant's air of fragility satisfied a woman's evolutionarily-driven desire to have someone to care after. Or maybe any player seeing how the male lead's throne has become pointless is taking the chance to seize the queen for himself. Speaking of which, why is she flirty with all and sundry? The mystery starts with everybody and ends with everybody.

Let's make this quick. The male lead breaks off fragments of a humongous passion flower bud and writes invitations to a rendezvous to all the suspects, urging secrecy and signing off as "Your Most Precious Dawg." That will be ambiguous enough to throw off innocent suspects. The location is indicated through a reference to a forest corner matching "my" (the manager's) name. Fortuitously for him, multiple team members have names corresponding to different aspects of the forest. Who will turn up in the right place?

On the day of reckoning, the male lead's eyes widen in disbelief as a number of people start converging at that location. He hurries down the towering dogwood twig he has been hiding on. Snag! One of those witchy tendrils wraps itself around his torso and hauls him up the air. The male lead wriggles in desperation as he feels like the squeezing tendril is breaking his young body into fragments for no strong reason.

All of a sudden, the tendril somewhat loosens its grip such that the male lead can finally breathe. The panting player then sees the entire body of males in their team looking up at him. They begin to help him down, but he, he barks at them for their collective betrayal. Before long, the message receivers piece together the puzzle.

Hurt ensues. The dainty assistant declares that he shall woo the manager for real from now on. The male lead grimaces and spits at his hypocrisy. One by one, several others make the same declaration. The male lead hollers like a beast dying under a thousand cuts. Urging all of them to calm down, the player who tried to save the manager reasons to the male lead: Yes, every single male on the team is romantically attracted to the manager; no, none of them would have crossed the line. They may never get to play rugby again but their sportsmanship is and will always be perfectly intact. On the other hand, the male lead is wrecking emotional havoc on himself before the grotesque forest detectably wrecks the health of anyone.

"Shameless liar! Are you telling me her new paramour is a ghost or a Cheshire cat?"

"Cut it out," the manager makes a stately entrance despite her clutches.

Mortified that his girl is also witnessing his deplorable state, the male lead closes his eyes for a while, finally takes a deep breath and pleads with the manager, "I'm terribly sorry that I flared up at you that day. Tell me, dear, that you invented your new romantic interest out of spite."

The manager sighs. As she helps him down with the assistance of the other guys, she apologizes for her change of heart and her brusque communication, without making any excuse for herself. Nevertheless, she firmly tells him that no one deserves his hostility in the absence of evidence. And if a romantic partner would drop him so swiftly because of adversity, he should just as swiftly spin away such an unworthy partner to the person's unlucky new lover like how he passes on a rugby ball with strength and finesse. She proceeds to slather ointment onto the male lead, but he stops her:

"The only thing that can heal me is the answer. Give me the evidence yourself then."

This moment reminds the others why they were an item.

"Like, X-ray my heart? You already heard the truth up there."

A bulb goes off in a player's head. He exclaims, "I get it! He got stuck by approaching this like a closed circle mystery. The answer is out there, in the normal world."

"It's this world."

Through the manager's eyes, we trace the lines and arcs of the grand botanical structures, some wild like fire and some seemingly adapted from Roman pillars, stare up at their intricate webs of veins and fiber, spreading across the sky above when you are underneath, and take in the rich hues of gray all around. The sheen of leaf wax is magnificent in the absence of color distraction. Grotesque? She applied bright red lipstick and adorned pink, frilly dresses because she equated them with womanhood. She applied for a managerial position because all those around her saw her as a born leader. She joined the sports industry because they saw the sunny, energetic girl as a sports person. She dated because romance is meant to be a natural part of life. But only now, among the enchanted, rebellious blackness of all shades, does she feel her heart truly swelling and her lungs fully breathing. Epic dreams and indescribable feelings spring forth and expand as she beholds and meanders through it. The forest's embrace is where she wants to spend an entire lifetime in.

Everyone is slack-jawed. How can you possibly have romantic love for a non-person? Just then, a player gasps and points at something, and the crowd looks in that direction. Pink glows are spreading up the oversized stalks and stems. They feel the temperature of the air steadily rising. A minute later, the entire forest speeds away from the team. Whooping and waving a clutch at the forest in exhilaration, the manager hobbles after it at an unbelievably rapid speed. The rest of the team chases her.

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Sky Whale Simulators

Physical experience idea: What's standing on giants compared to flying on giants? Daytime riders of the flying simulators have the exclusive options of biological whales of a great diversity (Extraordinary Attorney Woo) and cloud whales (My Voice For You), while nighttime riders have those of ember whales (3 Body Problem promotional event) and jelly whales (The School Nurse Files). Available round the clock are lightspeed ancient space whales whose majestic statures, glowing eyes and tentacles may belie their gentle disposition (Star Wars franchise).

Each rider dons VR goggles and a full-body suit which "haptic skin" channels the texture and temperature of her whale through fine patterns of forces and heat or coldness as well as the feels of real-time weather elements like clouds, wind, snow or wetness in the atmosphere of a selected location. The force of each element changes as necessary with the rider's change in velocity of travel. Live cameras and other sensors in that atmosphere relay the sounds and sights, complete with views of landscapes below, to the VR system. Virtual whale shadows are superimposed on perspiring pedestrians in need of shade and on other features she hovers over. The sonic experience must also encompass whale vocalizations such as whistles, pulsed calls and their mysterious songs, perhaps along with human music of one's choice. For the sake of health and safety, however, thresholds are applied to various conjured sensations. Alas, ember whales (see below).

Depending on the sensor numbers and arrangement, riders opting for a location can sign in to a multiplayer mode, through which they can see the avatars and flights of other riders there. Races and aerial sport games can be held among these riders. That said, riders in any mode who overexert or abuse their whales will be brusquely, but safely, thrown off by the whales. On the other hand, riders will enjoy rising priority in queues for multiplayer modes as they collect points by steering their whales over humans, animals or fragile objects overexposed to the weather.

Monthly premium subscription plans and standard student plans include VR and AR research newsletters and a bargain collection of books elucidating the technology. A Discord server can be set up for riders to float (pun intended) more ideas for whale variety, locations, contests and games.

But what's flying on giants compared to rescuing giants? A sizable percentage of the profits shall be channeled to marine life protection funds.

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The Copernicus Club

Award idea: An esteemed directory of academics, in any discipline, who habitually practice humility and patience in their interactions with everyone, humility being the vibe the Copernicuses in both live-action adaptations of The Three-Body Problem give off. By "everyone," we include junior academics, peers in other disciplines and the public. In a polarized, unequal world in need of synergistic collaboration yet ever inclined to abandon inconvenient logic in favor of pure emotion, as manifest in the hate crimes we have been witnessing, we need all hands on deck to nurture and cherish silo-breaking and any interest in a rigorous field of thought.

The most dedicated academics rise up to messy, sometimes unwritten challenges. Not content with some comfort zone, however elusive, that ensconces them in a network of like-minded, interested, competent and reasonable colleagues and students, they strive to bring the rest of those they come across up to par. They believe in humans' potential for change. The conscientious deserves attention; the passionate and the bright are sheer delight to work with; but the others, less willing or able to pull themselves up in these academics' areas of expertise, are where greater educational impact can be made. Gating off or deriding people unskilled in those areas, without offering concrete guidance, leaves gaping cognitive gaps that may never get appropriately remedied.

Hefty price of education and difficulties of securing acceptance as a member of an academic community must also not blind one to the potential fallibility of tenets one has had to imbibe (the overall defensibility of statutes of limitations?) in one's field or to intellectual opportunities beyond the customs of one's field (e.g. acceptable scope and subject matter of exploration). Discourses with outsiders can be invaluable in this respect.

Now, most practically, don't you wish you had (or, if you're still in time, have) this directory in your search for a graduate school advisor?

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Floral Bomb Bowling

Physical experience idea: For a touch of nature and a grit-cultivating element of unpredictability, players in medieval village garb or animal mascot costumes take turns to pick from a cart of transparent balloons stuffed with flower heads and petal powder. A greener alternative is Kenneth Kawamura's origami butterfly balls, each an assembly of jigsaw-like polyhedrals, but substituting grass-made (or, if feasible, petal-made) paper for ordinary paper and similarly enclosing flower heads and petal powder. Complicated impact dynamics are introduced as the balloon or ball selected for the turn may burst as it is rolled down the bowling lane. The elevated labor cost is justified because watching the jolly but starvation anxiety-inducing original game, Netflix's cabbage-bowling challenge (scroll to the bottom) for cast members of Avatar: The Last Airbender, sets off waves of warmth and guilt in relation to a tomato tennis tournament few know about. Food insecurity and crop wastage are real issues a double major in air-castle bending and soap bending readily overlooks until they see the real thing.

Note that Soap 4.0 is so far a text AI-free zone.

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Reborn Rawlsian

Sequel idea: Chaebol fiend 1-1 learns that his cruel son 1-1-1 has been reborn as a not only unnumbered but also unidentifiable underdog in his re-reseized conglomerate's vast network of stakeholders: employees, contractors, sub-contractors, vendors along the supply chain, small-time investors, retail customers, pollution sufferers, fellow taxpayers, public benefits recipients, etc. Nightmares of his underlings executing an accordingly uniformed or rags-draped version of his child on a desolate, roaring seaside cliff, the way an employee was killed under the instructions of someone in his family (spoiler-free description), recur until 1-1 successfully protects everyone in that stakeholder group.

Maximin and the Veil of Ignorance are two cornerstones of modern philosopher John Rawls' Original Position, from which he advocated deliberating among approaches to social justice. Found also in game theory, maximin refers to the highest value among the lowest possible outcomes, as its name suggests. Rawls argued that any social and economic inequalities must exist only if they lead us to a society which worst-off members fare better than the worst-off members of all other possible societies.*

The Veil of Ignorance is similarly common sense that has not translated to common reality. It says that decision makers in the above deliberation are to assume that they know nothing particular about themselves, such as their strengths, assets or specific interests.^ They only know broad facts applicable to most people like the need for income and opportunity.^ The possibility of being the worst-off person in any resulting society should then motivate each decision maker to secure the maximin.

The natural question to ask is how to ensure decision makers live up to those ideals. Could possibility, as opposed to significant probability, be enough of a motivator even if one were willing to turn a blind eye to adverse consequences for her relatively privileged, actual tribe? The most disadvantaged people do not necessarily constitute the lowest yet broadest stratum of a pyramid. They could be individuals suffering rare, exceptionally debilitating diseases, for instance. Compounding the matter is the tendency for the different components of the deliberation and feedback processes to lie in different parties: Systematic insights into differing justice approaches are concentrated among intellectuals; the power to distribute social goods lies in economic and political elites, not all of whom care to be intellectuals; the richest wealth of granular knowledge about the suffering of the worst-off members of society probably lies in themselves.

For public pressure and monitoring to effectively push decision makers into the Original Position, there must be adequate sharing of facts and sentiments among the three groups. Voices in support of the worst off need meme power, whether in the form of compelling logic pitches or emotional appeal, to compensate for disadvantage in numbers in any non-pyramidal society. That is where arts can structure medical, financial and sociopolitical access for the better, saving lives and dignity with nary a stethoscope.

There is one other solution. Near the end of the last episode, 1-1 lies in exhaustion on the copper-hued sands of a valley in Nallıhan, where shady plans were carried out in Reborn Rich, after rescuing his son for good. The poignant portrait shots are intercut with extensive flashbacks to tribulations the duo has undergone at the hands of selfish, uncooperative fellow power holders. But before long, the smooth talker springs up with a wicked glint in his eyes. 1-1 rises to the seat of national president on the strength of his now-impressive civil reform records and galvanizes support (don't ask about his extortionary tactics) for a new bill that mandates all capable people of working age to take a gap month every year in the most miserable sectors in the country, unless they already work or live in any of the sectors. The economic impact on existing workers in those sectors will have to be ascertained, however. And 1-1 may well get voted out of office by the next term. For now, nevertheless, he shall have his own revenge.

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*Rawls, J. (2001) Justice as Fairness: A Restatement. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 59-60.

^Rawls, J. (1999) A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 11, 53-54.

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Strumming Dawn

🌀-☉-☼ hybrid idea: While a cosmic symphony inaudible to characters roars and ripples across spacetime, an aged physicist plays on a rough street a violin tune evoking fragile beauty. This is a dystopian reality where science, pushed to its limits, has failed humanity. A friend excitedly runs up to him. The music comes to a triumphant halt. The two rush to meet the person who can help out with their busker self-help group's resource quagmires, a vivacious supreme court judge usually busy adjudicating large-scale crimes like the many senseless genocides that break out amid planetary cold droughts. When this non-profit advisor steps out of her bullet-proof car, however, he recognizes her as a wispy street dancer he donated food and money to back in the years he still had his own research group. When the now grown-up woman extends her elegantly sleeved hand to him, shame instantly overcomes the elder.

Chaotic melancholy colors his music in the days to come, until he realizes her disdain of performing itinerant girls, on whom she projects hatred of her past uneducated self who panders to any crude emotion for a few pennies. The merciless physical universe hates its creations and the diverse creations hate each other enough as it is; why should two practitioners of law — him physical laws and her human laws — who aspire to be above the superficial facade of life bog themselves down by making self-hatred a law too?

Arts sometimes reinforce this law yet can be uplifting lawbreakers too. The busker self-help group proceeds to organize a music movement showcasing how street performers are their own people with diverse sets of values. Each can be more than the taste vessel economic circumstances may compel her to act as.

But then cataclysm after cataclysm erupt right at home. The pair of protagonists battle the crises to each's best ability from their different tiers of society. The elder is starstruck to see the woman championing legal access and physical protection for the girls she would rather not see again. His overblown reaction sets off hearty laughter from her.

At times mirrors to each other and at times film negatives of each other, the old physicist/violinist and young dancer/justice develop a spiritual companionship that never blossoms into romance but nurtures on their tumultuous yet ever-yearning love of their vast, broken world. That is really more than enough.

Sweeping astronomical and landscape cinematography would be employed not for grandeur and pomp but to highlight human vulnerability and the diminutiveness of materialistic pursuits against the scale and forces of the cosmos. The limited series would also be a rich acoustic experience in which music echoing heartbreak and determination is brilliantly generated through sounds of sand, water and wind whereas audio converted from gravitational waves sent out by colliding black holes, etc. is used as a haunting soundtrack in the background. On the flip side, since our feelings, values and self-perceived worth of possessions are arguably beyond physical scales of measurement, so much so that it may not be wrong to declare any as astronomical, vibrant musical sonifications of space data would punctuate screen sequences at critical turning points in characters' emotional arcs. Marching footsteps and writing sounds would be mixed as soundtracks accompanying civic movements.

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Playdough X Playdough

Element expansion idea: Corruption turns people and institutions it touches into literal playdough in a country — the people, because they become mere material means to some ends or are handled in a cavalier manner, the institutions, because they become funhouses that fail to serve practical needs. Formal funhouses do better than that.

The agents of corruption themselves, whether bribe extractors or middlemen, are often muddy playthings thrown off the path of higher reason and into chaotic whirlpools by primal forces, be these fear, greed, lust, jealousy, or want of power. Their worldviews are pathetically narrow. At times, the primal force is self-preservation under limited economic choices, deep-seated need to belong, or some other sympathetic cause, but sympathy does not alter their toy status, already a fact — it only alters the toy repair kit, the remedy.

The playdough imagery is an acquired visualization skill, like the awakening to reality in The Matrix franchise, not a given. Some errant actors arrogantly see themselves as and behave like humans, noticing neither how dough breaks off from them and marks their trails nor their hilarious deformities accumulated on grazing past sturdy objects. Tens (or hundreds) of millions of taxpayers contribute enormous streams of time and funds to the erection of buildings that may look stately to them but are really cartoonish circus tents or slimy huts. Stagnant seas of needy institution users wait for support in vain while oblivious to the squishiness of pillars.

There are, on the other hand, errant actors who not only are cognizant of their doughhood but also take pride in their self-malleability. Civilization, with its inefficient, opaque layers, chronically underfunded workers and checkpoints readily convertible into fast lanes or walls everywhere, has always been a game in their view. You cannot blame them, they argue, for playing according to the real, unwritten rules. Yet when they get on the wrong side of some fuchsia-pink diva or lime-green tyrant and their colorful stashes are seized to spell their doom, the guillotine still hears their inner shrieks. The tear-stained, lumpy heads are swiftly remolded and traded as soccer balls among their unrepentant partners in crime.

Leading a revolution against the playdough malaise is a task even more grueling than what it may seem, since you do not see the reality of yourself, your comrades or your fortresses until what appear as flesh and concrete are put under a battery of tests. As more and more of your panorama turns into soft figurines and collapsible structures wherever you head to, you also stare at your own smudgy stumps that were once human limbs and realize there is no choice but to lumber onward as a fragile toy army. Toyhood is said to be a leisurely affair of little things lifted and driven around by Brobdingnagian hands, but the remaining humans are too harried, too few and far between and probably not human anymore by the time you reach them. All of your flaking, drooping bodies cannot afford the wait for them to bring in public sector transparency, streamlined administration, proper financing structures and stiff penalties. Shake a fist at the writing team in the skies overhead for not forgoing the need to fill dough stomachs in this fantasy premise.

And so, you prop up each other, prepare makeshift cells for traitors and march on in this perilous, long journey. There is pride too in the somber army's malleability, but that malleability is in the choice to stand tall and champion for a resilient habitat livable for all rather than to succumb, one unshapely clump after another, to a viscid giant mattress of temptation.

Check out the alt text of the header image.

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Trade Playground Misaeng

Remake + ○●-Severance hybrid idea: A data science enthusiast is economically compelled to settle for a Go job in her alternate reality, where costs for higher-level computational processing like her original specialty are exorbitant due to resource depletion, AlphaGo and the like have not been invented and organizations resort to mind-control headsets that translate the logic in mundane onscreen work to gameplay logic. These headsets fortuitously use materials not yet in scarcity in that world. The closer the work meets end goals and procedural standards, the better the mentally displayed Go game progresses. The purpose of the translation is two-fold: 1) achieve watertight protection of commercial secrecy and 2) boost employee motivation in a compact, non-graphics-intensive manner.

But since even Go experts may falter on bad-hair days, work protocols limit employees to a small range of moves for each narrowly defined game scenario, which means office jobs still induce yawns regardless of one's fondness of Go. Worse, workers spend years in Go academies only to face potential skill attrition in autonomous analytical and strategic thinking and in solution creativity as they work round the clock in this manner until elderhood.

Intelligence and knowledge perish sooner than one's capacity for altruism, provided the will for the latter lasts. Faced with the same bleak circumstances, some strive to rise above their station in life in a self-determined sense by not only enduring the grind with increasing grit (as far as self-care permits) and rallying around their teams but also extending comradeship and empathy to everyone, whereas some help themselves Misaeng villain-style to what they see as substitute additional compensation: corporate moneys and female playthings.

The heroine stoically sticks to the former approach, Misaeng hero-style. Her spiritual counsel is a set of principles from her data science days:

Garbage in, Garbage out: How much do you trust ethical decision-making founded on empty stomachs, sleep-deprived brains and hatred-consumed memories? Don't ill-treat yourself yet expect to be unfailingly seen as a good grid conqueror. Don't ill-treat your co-workers yet expect unfailing support from them when you slip into a needy position. (But don't expect sympathy either if you cite your reception of ill treatment as justification for your ill treatment of someone. When people are struggling to escape your claws, they do not have the cognitive bandwidth to analyze your personal history.)

Actionable Insights: Endlessly regurgitating negative experiences you are powerless to redress through yourself or through others perpetuates the pain, although perpetual flashbacks are sometimes passive phenomena individuals are powerless to stop. Look out for facts you can act on. For example, do you feel more irritable as the night thickens? How about investing in a cozy LED lamp to boost your enemy-encircling efficiency after dusk? Does your brain come alive during the dull workday only during lunch? How about snacking on colorful berries as you move your stones?

Watch out for Outliers: See beyond immediate gratification and momentary bruises to the ego for the full picture. While do-no-gooders collect future lawsuits, festering grudges, and other ticking time-bombs, you plot your narrowing financial distance to your dreams for each day of hardship or plot your growing insights into multifaceted human nature for each negotiation on fair game allocation.

Mindful Annotation: A small act of kindness can be a quick glow-up and perk-me-up. A small thought for others can be respite from the prison of your own anxieties. In contrast, don't you ever wonder why various screen characters pursue evil as a vocation only to look perpetually stressed and on the guard? What begin as petty comparison and moderate insecurity in those series blow up into messy huge schemes and constant paranoia. Real-life victims may believe, too, that their thirst for justice outlasts perpetrators' feelings of dominion and thrill. Moreover, workplace guidelines and public discourse are increasing on honest stone laborers' side.

Self-care and self-improvement do not imply surrendering to an unhealthy work-life arrangement. The ending reminds us of this as the heroine runs along rooftops above congested streets to submit a labor reform petition on time. We see in parallel a sequence of her leaping between roofs and another of Misaeng's protagonist doing nearly the same, except that a wide anti-suicide net visibly hangs between her roofs. There is no shame in valuing her life.

Check out the alt text of the header image.

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{ Gourmet X Ancient Rooftop } Sommelier

Metadrama-variety series idea: A dude who scorns Asian dramas is having the indoor infinity pool in his buddy's penthouse all to himself when the light fixtures and equipment systems explode. The impact sends the dude bursting out of the glass wall in a colorful cloud of sparks and shards and into the night sky. And the precipitous descent mysteriously lands him in the universe of historical cdramas. Horrified at this greatest scandal of his life, he hurriedly tries to escape but is stopped in his tracks by the curious nightlife — couples, besties and even an extended family dining on sloping rooftops.

Now here is a pastime the wealthy buddy he envies cannot readily purchase in their city. In each episode, the dude, recording his imaginary vlog, introduces us viewers to the finest rooftops for various East Asian dishes. That is all while wearing only swimming trunks. Factors he explores include:

Companion characters (the kind glutton, the spoilt heirs or a sword heroine fantastic at slicing up a feast with her weapon?)

Terrestrial scenery (sprawling cityscapes, cosy villages, bustling festivals, swordfights on roofs opposite, etc.) that complements the flavors

Astronomical sightings across the calendar

Wind strength and direction

Relationship between roof material and surface temperature (ask jdrama Fermat's Cuisine on the culinary importance)

Appetite stimulation through thrilling roof architecture (how much pointiness for your rear?)

At the end of each episode, he adds a gruff disclaimer that he still doesn't care for Asian dramas. Not at all. Never in this lifetime. No amount of food or sightseeing can bribe him. He's only hosting this show for money! And the pretty maidens! And the shiny swords! DON'T. EVER. CALL. HIM. A. CDRAMA. FAN. We shall not expose him.

The finale of the series finishes with the dude screaming at the top of his lungs that this show cannot end, while blinding white light submerges the gorgeous cdrama night universe. This light gradually morphs and shrinks into neon commercial signs, and he finds himself on a bustling urban street. On seeing a PPL Pizza Hut sign in front of him, the dude in trunks fantasizes drawing Eastern dragons at the ends of its roof and his stomach groans. Passersby noticing the dreamy show host's tears of joy marvel that they never knew the fast food is that heavenly.

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Journal of Temporal Merphysics

Metadrama idea: A non-hearing, female version of Where's Waldo? in time travel.

A bunch of high school seniors are noisily snacking in a sunlight-dappled, mostly empty grand library while compiling materials for a presentation required in a Time class when one of them draws attention to a potential interabled romance story that just refuses to start in various real-life biography notes.

Volume 1: Limits of Optics

Issue 1

A nameless, orphaned tween liked to explore the nooks and crannies of the old textile factory where he worked as an inventory clerk.

In the shadows of its underbelly, he saw a grubby assembly line supervisor sneeringly approaching a child who looked even younger than him.

The boy rescued the shrieking child with his precocious wit.

She darted away from him like a phantom sparrow.

Issue 2

After checking out the spot on more occasions, the boy learnt that the child was a non-hearing, illiterate and illegally employed factory hand whose communication barriers were regularly exploited by abusers in the factory.

With much trouble, the boy got accepted as a friend by the suspicious girl.

The shadows became their playground, mock revenge headquarters, candlelit percussion stage and spelling and arithmetic school from then on.

The alien-like scribbles and tool layouts left behind spooked the occasional adult "normal" interloper, who subsequently kept a distance.

Issue 3

As the pair grew together over the years, factory equipment in the distance would sound like wistful ballads were being spun out as the girl watched the boy excitedly gesture his ambitions and stories about same-age girls he liked.

One late evening, he tugged at her ponytail as usual. She chased him around as usual. But after three laps around a newly abandoned giant rotor, he disappeared into thin air, never to be seen in that time period again.

She tried running more laps around the rotor, but remained in the factory shadows.

Supplement

"Serious? You saw an academic book mention the wistful ballads? Or darting like a phantom sparrow, for that matter?" Somebody quibbles. The other students hush him with "Poetic license, poetic license!" and a couple stuff gummy worms into his mouth.

Volume 2: Law of Statistics

Issue 1

The boy spun around to find the girl and the factory missing. He was now in a dazzling, bustling, speckless city full of funny wheels and other curios.

No obese, pockmarked or limping person could be seen on the miles and miles of streets he trudged on. This city was so perfect you could not spot any ordinary citizen with any form of special needs, let alone someone from another era communicating in sign language.

The starving boy could not find his way back to the girl.

Issue 2

A great deal of administrative upkeeping and technological wizardry kept the city this gleaming and dreamily flawless. Now that every element in nature and the man-made world was meticulously propertized and mechatronically gated, that extensive safeguards must be met before every action, and that the basics — smart devices, virtual currencies and identity certification — were out of his reach, the boy could not access food, jobs, medicine, or even information the way he did as a self-raised tween in his own era.

He was a runaway zoo exhibit in every populated place he went. The meaner motorists and riders passing by, chuckling at his shabby look and struggles with machines, loudly wondered why this beggar foolishly strayed from his institution for the infirm. The kinder ones looked at him with weird wonder or woeful pity.

The boy had understood the girl more than anyone else. But to the extent that disability entailed incapacitation in aspects of self-presentation and personal functioning society demanded, he now felt her daily struggles on a more visceral level.

There was a time or two he felt a genuinely concerned, familiar look in his direction, only to see more gawkers on swerving around.

He swore to charge the vehicles viewing fees, be that soondae or wurst tray. But more than anything, he longed to return to protect the girl more fiercely, not out of pity, but out of deepened solidarity and a fervor to go against the tide of a humanity with far more tolerance for moral ineptitude than for physical and socioeconomic ineptitude.

Issue 3

While the boy was stealthily picking for scraps from a garbage bin one night, a patrol car stopped by. He started to take flight like the girl did when the pair first met, but a patrol officer's offer of normal accommodation and meals over her public address system proved eventually too tempting to a traveler with increasingly heavy eyelids and blistering soles.

In the patrol car, he tried to look calm even as he scrutinized the route closely and feared that he would be lodging with jailbirds. The officer and her sergeant on the walkie-talkie attempted to break ice by joking about how their names, Taylor Swyft and Andrew Leo Webster respectively, betrayed their identities as undercover superstars from the past, but the situation only looked fishier to him.

The shelter turned out to be a church with a spare bed. For the first time in a long while, he could close his eyes without a care in the world.

Footnote

Sounds of running footsteps echoed day after day around the abandoned giant rotor back in the original timeline.

Supplement

"That's our girl, amirite?" The librarian helps herself to one of the students' pistachio pops while looking over their shoulders. Someone grumblingly wonders how much the institution pays her.

Volume 3: Principle of Protection

Issue 1

Months into the industrious boy's custodian job at the church, an impressed college dean frequenting the place took him under his tutelage, going as far as securing scholarships for him.

During the documentation process, in which the authorities accepted the youth as a memory-impaired person after much reluctance, the boy gave himself his very first formal name: Simon Bo Văn. Bo and Văn were tributes to his Asian ancestry. In Hebrew, Shim'ôn means "He has heard." That was even without a sound from the suffering person.

To make up for expenses not covered by the scholarships, Simon tidied equipment and wiped bench surfaces part-time at the dean's Weir lab, which got the ambition cogwheels in his brain rotating again. But, no, he must stay focused. A young girl was waiting for him.

At college, Simon double-majored in physics and sociology. One might lead him back to the girl. The other might lead them to an X-ray atlas of humanity's dark gaze network. They shall be the gazers this time, from the God's eye view of ivory towers.

Issue 2

A major nemesis appeared in the form of an eccentric musician. How did we get here? Well, Simon was presenting his quantum physics research at a science fair open to all when the musician enthused that the principle elucidated by the findings would elevate electronic music. He shook Simon's hands vigorously and congratulated himself for spotting the perfect rival. ("But I don't make music." "Ooooh, you shall!")

The musician used public pressure to egg on Simon to compete with him to devise the best music instrument. Not one to be forever bullied, Simon called out his tactic. Gleefully, the musician changed the name of his one-man band to Egg on the spot, to the crowd's roaring laughter.

And that was only the beginning. Simon's quick wits and versatility left the musician in greater awe after the contest. No way was he letting go of this genius with boundless possibilities who could push the musician to greater heights. "Page" after "Page," we see the musician roping Simon into a wakeboarding challenge, a mountain climbing challenge, a startup challenge and a challenge to retrofit the most underprivileged homes in a week.

Simon really, really missed the girl in her shadows.

Issue 3

Ideas from the musician flowed so much like an endless stream that Simon was starting to see him not only everywhere but also in his dreams. He even started to feel a strange attraction to the guy.

Shocked at this self-discovery, Simon called the musician a manipulative, egocentric divo with no self-awareness. The musician was finally stunned into contrite silence. He profusely apologized, then sincerely explained he did not want Simon's multipotentiality to be locked away in a comfort zone, and invited Simon to set limits on their contact intervals.

The musician's reaction tore at Simon.

That was what humanity needed: the ability to alternate between the light and the shadows, to prosper yet know itself intimately.

On top of that, all Simon had thought of, in contrast to the musician, was returning to shield the girl from danger in the safety of her hometown. Not once did he consider bringing her to the present or a future where policy and technology could mitigate her hearing impairment or its effects, let alone exposing her to different environments and different challenges within her uncertain lifespan.

Should he if he ever had a chance? Could she survive this place when he, a perfectly physically abled man, struggled so much to?

Yet that was but a hypothetical question. He conquered the waves and the ragged wilderness but failed the fundamental question: He did not even permit the girl to grow outside her or history's comfort zone in his imagination.

One could study both the sciences and the humanities but not wire them together with ease for a scalable solution to affairs of the heart.

Footnote

Sounds of running footsteps continued to echo day after day around the abandoned giant rotor back in the original timeline.

Supplement

"What?! For how many pages has she been running? Is she going to just dwell as a faceless existence in footnotes?" While the librarian is distracted, some students grab hold of remaining smoothies. A narrator tells her to relax, for the story is coming to an end.

Volume 4: Simply Connected Space

Issue 1

Lives, too, must come to an end. The dean fell terminally ill when Simon became a postdoc, so Simon took care of him at the dean's residence to repay his kindness, despite the old man's protests. The musician's earlier problems with respecting boundaries must have rubbed off on Simon. At the residence, Simon chanced upon stashes of time-travel experiment records in a storage room. And in a secret vault laid models resembling the abandoned giant rotor back in Simon's time.

Our male protagonist rushed back to the bedroom to plead for answers from the dean. If time travel was possible again, he wanted to go back for real, tell everything to the girl and let her decide for herself whether she should risk the migration.

The dean smiled sadly at him, revealing that he knew the girl. As Simon guessed, the giant rotor refused to work for her despite months of her running circles around it. When it finally worked, she found herself with no body, sound or scent at her destination. She frantically looked high and low for Simon and cried at the sight of him on the road, but was ultimately invisible also to him.

Horrified at the disclosure, Simon pressed the dean for her whereabouts. The frail dean stroked Simon's head, asking him if he really yearned to see his sweet-hearted childhood friend since context and time could change people, but fell into a coma before he could say more. The dean's demise was later announced.

Issue 2

Giving up was never Simon's thing. For years, he studied the dean's models, records and research papers closely, ran computer simulations, sourced for intricate mechanical components and eventually built up numerous versions of the giant rotor.

This might well be the day. Simon took a deep breath and started to run around a giant rotor that held great promise in the reverse direction. First lap. Second lap. Destiny needed to be next.

But just a second into the last lap, someone grabbed him by the arm. Simon looked around and instinctively reacted with a conflicted look.

Issue 3

It was the musician. In anguish, Simon began telling him about a lost, invisible girl he must save even though everything was going to sound bizarre and far-fetched, but the musician cut him off in an unusually somber tone, "I have the remainder of her story."

Practically a ghost, the desolate girl followed Simon for a while, unable to do anything for him, then wandered on hallways looking for answers to everything. She ended up spending long, lonely years reading opened books and notes in libraries and sitting in on lectures. By and by, she mastered quantum mechanics and spent decades working out time travel.

Her perseverance led her to an electromagnetic field that sent her to an earlier era, where she finally regained her young, fit corporeal form and all.

But when she managed to assemble a giant rotor which tunable electromagnetic field could send her forward in time without turning her invisible, she realized that the technology only allowed her to appear at future destinations as a male most of the time and never as a disabled person.

On further thought, however, why should our perceived identities matter more than who we made a positive impact on? With tremendous paperwork difficulty, she attended a police academy and became a police sergeant to locate Simon again but was too late at first. Simon had been so malnourished and frostbitten he did not survive for long after her rescue. To work with more hands, she made another round back and forth in time, staying underpromoted as a patrol officer to scour the streets and cameras for him while collaborating with her previous, sergeant self.

Rescuing Simon was not enough in this supercilious, paranoid society, though. So she took a third round trip and fought vicious institutional politicking to become a college dean who could mentor and advocate for Simon. As the dean, she was touched yet regretful to witness Simon dedicate his entire academic career to the protection of her. However, she did not want Simon to live his life for her when she had already lived hers for him. And so it was that she embarked on a fourth trip while terminally ill and freshly awake from a medically induced coma — to live as his devoted multi-challenger.

Simon looked at the musician in wide-mouthed shock. Tears of fatigue and relief welled up in their red-rimmed eyes.

Footnote

A trusted mentee of the dean, willing to migrate backwards, arrived in the past to dismantle the constructed giant rotors, followed by the abandoned giant rotor that incidentally enabled time travel. Someday, however, Time scholars may rediscover the mechanics of time travel.

Supplement

The librarian quickly dabs her glossy lips and dramatically admonishes the students for misbehavior, to their amusement. But one after another, they nudge each other and wipe up their stuff. The head librarian glares at everyone from an upper level. As the students trudge out of the library, the building name reads, "Weir Public Library of Arts and Sciences."

Acknowledgment

This idea has been inspired by the following commentators' observations that onscreen female characters rarely travel forward in time: frabsiscrabsis (retweeted by @thedramanotes) and Mila. The author is indebted to Mila for taking time to read an earlier version of the story and for her enlightening feedback. This does not mean that any of these writers endorses the story or is responsible for its missteps. The bullet point format is a thematic choice. All the same, discussions on developing the idea into a book project or other media will be greatly welcome.

A close variant of the light-versus-shadows concept can be found in Extraordinary You. Drama viewers are free to visualize the following actors in the roles: Twinkling Watermelon's Shin Eun-soo as the non-hearing heroine, Someday Or One Day's Greg Hsu as Simon and Fermat's Cuisine's Hosoda Kanata as the musician.

[soapver4]

From: Future Me

Merch + ad idea: Roaringly swirling purple smoke awaits below as a crimson dragon of magnificent stature prepares to plunge down an abyss, while zombies in tattered work attires watch on from behind, some drooling, some helpless and some indifferent. Humans only like dragons from afar. At close range, they want instead things that look tame and are of some use to them. But the crimson dragon? Its sole skill is breathing out fire. You cannot trust it to serve dishes, attract customers or sit down for long in a cramped minion hideout to draft reports.

Just then, an iridescent dragon swoops down from the heavens, "Hello, past me."

"I — have a birth secret?"

The iridescent dragon transforms into a bespectacled human.

"I am also future you."

"One helluva birth secret," The crimson dragon's majestic jaws drop.

"These are probable futures you're born with, ready to be germinated under the right conditions. Don't let us perish with you."

Floating images of a sleek app interface flash across the screen.

"From: Future Me is an AI app which large multimodal model is trained on a carefully anonymized pool of diverse patient data curated with their full consent. It maps these patient traits and treatment modalities to long-term life outcomes and then translates your input data and chosen hypothetical treatment option to one of your positive future selves, rendered in 4K resolution. Interact with these future selves to explore their daily lives, relationships, hobbies and dreams.

See your self take on more colors, light and skills or transform into different species in the exciting years to come. Or, you can just be your same old self."

The bespectacled human morphs into a crimson dragon.

"Huh? You're sure you're a mental health app commercial?"

"Look behind you."

The original crimson dragon looks back to see the zombies turn into healthy, chatting humans in clean clothes occasionally waving at the dragons.

"Grow together in therapies with the entire universe so that all of us learn to embrace each other's beauty and power.

Check out the accreditation, clinical evidence, expert notes and user testimonies on the website. Download the app today.

♫ ♬ 🎵"

[soapver4]

Psychological Supply and Demand

Spinoff idea: A psychtech biz procedural that's similarly at times dark and at times hopeful. Notice how the original series and in fact the real world prescribe a potentially self-contradictory coping approach for mental health sufferers: Prioritize your needs over others' but also seek out a support network. As empathetic and detailed as the series otherwise mostly is, the people whose needs are deprioritized as a result are conveniently relegated to the background: The sister who also struggles with childcare support is faceless; the mania patient supposed to be rebuffed for company hardly appears again. Perhaps we are meant to assume that someone in a better or more suitable mental state will be their support network instead, yet exhaustion and emotional turmoil may well be the norm in your own circle. You can say that this nail-biting spinoff is the orphaned progeny of the reality of our frayed and choked social networks.

Episode 1 👂

Our spinoff's heroine is the chirpy mania patient Yoon Ji-sun. In this new story, Ji-sun follows the professional advice of seeking a support network, only for her besties, all leading harried lives, to reply distractedly ("Yeah. That's what life is like." "Why do you have time to care about that?") or snap that she should just seek professional help. Ji-sun seizes upon the idea of a social app that connects people who need a support network with those willing to be part of one. Prospective angel investors, however, are skeptical about a mania sufferer's capacity for sustained focus and coolheaded-judgment. Happily, Ji-sun's personality eventually wins her a mega-following of crowdfunders.

Episode 2 ❦

Predators join the app, like they do on ride-sharing apps. Mental vulnerability is a particular magnet for some of them. Some of Ji-sun's friends also disclose their hesitation to discuss private troubles with total strangers, predators or not predators. Ji-sun decides to pivot to the development of a Buddy-in-Your-Pocket conversational app which generative AI emulates the best examples of peer support. She must convince her funders, who see generative AI as a dubious, soulless and even freaky technology. A real-life account of a son grieving by interacting with a chatbot that captures the qualities of his father touches them. The folks whose company we love are not generic.

Episode 3 👂

A few startup mentors reassure Ji-sun that app users only want to solve their problems and will not be bothered by how she assembles the product. Ji-sun gathers chat logs and conversations from Reddit, X/Twitter, etc. to train her software to react in the most comforting and understanding manner possible. But some netizens catch on to her sources and an uproar ensues. The public slams her for plagiarism, privacy invasion and commoditization of online community interactions. Terribly shaken, Ji-sun initially denies the charges but ultimately repents and plucks up the courage to apologize to everyone.

Episode 4 ❦

Ji-eun's psychological condition worsens under the stress. A long time passes before she regains some lost support. Thankfully, roping in an esteemed media ethics activist, a spunky new female character named Jin In-jung, as a startup partner further boosts her rebound.

"Don't just shake your head from the sidelines, Ms Campaigner. Come tackle the moral hazards together!"

Episode 5 👂

The app starts to gain traction. However, mental health experts denounce her for playing psychiatrist and distracting users from therapy. Nothing, they insist, can replace the human touch. Ji-sun feels betrayed that the professionals who urge her to seek out a support network beyond the hospital walls are now publicly condemning her for doing exactly that. Each side accuses the other of preserving or advancing their own economic interests under the pretext of public interest. Numerous supporters and detractors add fuel to fire, while a few caution against painting all healthcare practitioners, tech entrepreneurs or users in the same simple strokes. In-jung calms down the situation by drafting more conversational responses that remind users to consult mental health professionals. There is even a clickable tree icon that loads a directory of professionals in various specialties and locations.

Episode 6 ❦

Shock waves more severe than ever ripple through the app community after a hacker replaces all responses with the message "Even this app has given up on you. Go off the ledge to do the world a favor, loser." Before Ji-sun has time to react, users find their past conversations on the app, complete with their darkest thoughts and relationship details, leaked on the web. In-jung is beyond upset with Ji-sun. Ji-sun files a lawsuit against the hacker while battling a class action lawsuit against herself for negligence. Burnt on both ends, she lands back in a closed psychiatric ward where her phone and laptop are kept away from her. Ji-sun screams at the impossibility of managing her thorny legal and business affairs without internet access.

Episode 7 👂

Ji-sun apologizes to the ward staff. The costs — server, manpower, legal and medical — mount. On her way out, a stranger sneers at her for being so lost in her euphoric pipe dream of a world-changing "help app" when she should be on unemployment benefits. Staring at the colorful, busy city that seems to be revolving around her just fine, Ji-sun cannot help but wonder if her app is just another mania symptom. But right after her next outpatient appointment, she spots a teenager rocking her legs and smiling at the app while waiting for her turn at the crowded clinic. Ji-sun's vision may not be real but individuals who need a word of acknowledgment of their pain and worth at any time of the day are real. Ji-sun stands in front of a cybersecurity academy, ready to fight back for the sake of those people.

Episode 8 ❦

The controversies fade after some time, but so does the app novelty. A former user tells Ji-sun that he cannot shake off the truth: At the end of the day, his conversational partner is a mere bot with no genuine feelings for him. It says nothing about what he means to the living world. Ji-sun ruminates on this as she hikes up a mountain: Many problems in our world are gargantuan; we can only chip away at them, not solve them in one or two strokes. She announces a new generative AI app — From: Future Me.

[soapver4]

Ink Botanicals Academies for Sleepy Immortals

Sequel + 📺-social sciences hybrid idea: A virtuoso bamboo painter in ancient China ascends to an idyllic heaven as a deity after his politically troubled time on Earth. Alas, the light, ethereal pastel robes and saintly, detached mannerisms of the immortals of various ranks belie the corruption and hoarding also rife among them. Clenching his fists in renewed determination, the painter proceeds to campaign for the widespread establishment of what he believes is the antidote: bamboo painting academies. Bamboo plants, he reasons, are evergreen, resilient and unadorned. Tracing their simple yet dignified leaves and stems would cultivate rectitude in immortals. A few immortals, however, roll their eyes at that prescription.

"What made you think what worked for you would work for most immortals, if any? Did you even get the cause-effect relationship correct? And if your bamboo passion did work on you, it might be because you were a good guy to start with and strove to make yourself an even better person through whatever you chose to see in bamboo. A lump of wood could have been your teacher too!"

Others chime in from their self-playing flute music picnics and languid wine parties.

"Look at how many demented politicians dabble in art. Tsk, tsk."

(That would be why they rather travel inside art than parade art.)

"Hey, we can't rule out the possibility! Our motherland doesn't have high artistic and moral regard for bamboo for nothing. Maybe if enough randomly selected people take up bamboo leaves painting and we compare them against their peers with the same traits and backgrounds, we can see that the pursuit more likely than not improves the average person."

"You guys can experiment with panda grub. I'll place my bets on something more emotive: human food. My academies shall paint tangerine plants. The bright, cheery colors of their fruit stimulate your appetite for warmth and positivity. No more selfish officials and lazy bystanders!"

More immortals roll their eyes.

"Make that the bitter, dark brown herb, tuber fleeceflower. A school of thought cannot have genuine, lasting effects if it turns a blind eye to reality. And integrity needs grit."

"Bittergourd."

"Spinach."

"Oh, come on, life is not all bleakness and despair. Try litchi trees. The flesh under the rosy peel is translucent and juicy. Just the wellspring of inspiration for transparency and earnestness of character!"

And so the squabbling immortals set up a system whereby painters assessed to be skilled in depicting any of those plants get to teach in academies for that plant and others are randomly selected and sorted into the various academies as learners.

We talk about dramas as thought experiments, but here's where it would be awesome to try the reverse. Test out these art classes in the real world to guide the ending of the sequel. Evidence-based dramas need to be a genre too.

Meanwhile, heaven is a colorful, leafy quasi-paradise full of scrolls and intermingling scents of ink and fruit and where the busy sounds of brushes and rustling long sleeves are heard from outside every other pavilion and hall. It's just not quite heavenly for genuinely congenitally hyperactive and clumsy immortals.

Check out the alt text of all images.

[soapver4]

Slice-of-Life Hailstorms

Remake + 🐶-🔎🔍 Hybrid Idea: Two talented high school math teachers tremble and transform into Siberian Huskies whenever a hailstorm begins in their hail-prone town, which is how they meet, bicker and fall in love ("This four-legged one is better at math than me!" "My students don't have a smidge of that weird doggo's passion for math!" "Silly me. I thought s/he was the real deal."). To return to their human forms, the couple must solve a math problem perplexing anybody. In preparation for such emergencies, people familiar enough with them would keep some math books around or bookmark math websites. When the transformation happens too far away from those people, though, the couple needs to look for math victims and solve the problems surreptitiously without freaking out anyone.

By and by, however, the couple looks beyond the awkwardness, inconvenient hunger pangs, etc. to embrace the light-hearted side of their predicament, solving equations and scratching out polygons, nodes and edges together with their paws on the snow-like ground. Sometimes, they would straighten out an unknowing neighbor's grocery budget, etch out the answers on a flour-covered kitchen table and peek from the yard at the neighbor's spooked but enlightened expression. Sometimes, they would untangle an inventory mystery threatening a perplexed work couple's dinner date. Sometimes, it's optimizing a delivery person's route. Sometimes, they would compete with each other to calculate the areas of quirky features of their town to fight for the right to a rare dog biscuit, occasionally uncovering land development corruption scandals in the process. Sometimes, they would revisit the simple joy of apple and orange story problems. Sometimes, they would trace out wild trigonometric curves and circles on the hills and pull each other on makeshift sleds along the resulting paths.

The world is still volatile and suffering. But in their two-canine microcosm, at least, math is not a hated symbol of stress, a cold KPI or a mere stepping stone for uncaring administrators' and learners' careeristic advancements.

[soapver4]

The Busy Deaths of Death

Remake Idea: Death, clad in black feathers, twirls a pink rose glistening with mysterious dew between her long fingers:

What's in a scene? That which we call a death By any other process would smell as savage

She punishes an evictee who committed suicide by reincarnating him into an infinite sequence of people. Wait there. The Death is in the details. When he is reincarnated, his soul gets evenly integrated with the soul of the host body, and this resulting soul gets evenly integrated with the soul of the next host body on the next reincarnation, and so on, such that his autonomy diminishes by half with each reincarnation. His original soul watches on helplessly and more and more weakly as his authentic values and interests get further and further ignored by each newly constituted soul. Smirking at us, Death christens this form of death Social Media Stocks.

Indignant at how their loved ones' limited lives were used to punish someone they have no responsibility for, departed families of the hosts gather in hell for a daring plot. [Spoiler caution w.r.t. the original series] Die, Death! Can she? What would it mean? Legal death can be defined by brain death, biological death by a process that stretches on even after conventionally recognized cardiac death: cell senescence, tissue decay, etc. In physics, death can entail the freezing of all atomic and subatomic motions in the universe, or in all universes if a multiverse exists. Water cooler philosophy talks about death by oblivion. None of these is both generative of irreversible staticity and probable in the future of our kind. Brain deaths occur amid brain births. Molecules migrate from and to bodies dead and alive. When death is so active and everywhere — and pulling off soul-refining explosions and shootouts in a slick, highly entertaining and well-meaning K-drama that hits many emotional notes — Death is by no means dead!

One of the few certainties, outside of theology and highly challenging technological advances, is the eventual death of particular consciousness. Except that our unique minds are already dying under the daily capitalistic grind of 24/7 work cultures and popularity-anxious (social) media cultures.

Hopefully the departed families in this remake successfully mine the cliffs and dungeons of hell to put together the right bullets for their version of Death. Or perhaps, they realize that Death dies not through violence but through bonding and heart-to-heart communication. For our part, don't stop at asking how many books the average (social) media consumer consumed in the past year. Ask also how many original intellectual works the consumer created in the past year.

Warning: Viewers expressed discomfort with the extreme sadism in episode 5 of the original K-drama.