Haha seriously. It's shocking how fast the quality of people drops off once you reach the southern parts of Gyeonggido. True countryside folk are some of the best people I've encountered here, but people from the cities outside Seoul are a whole different breed.

I have lived here for 15+ years

I think this is coloring your opinions here, for 2 specific reasons:

1. You forgot what it's like back home, wherever home is.
   I could copy/paste your post into locale-based Facebook groups from nearly anywhere and get 1000 likes immediately, because people are assholes everywhere. My friends back home make posts just like this, completely sure that life wasn't like this 20 years ago. I think you're going to find pretty similar behavior in a lot of places. It's hardly a Korea specific thing, and frankly I think Korea is in general a lot better about this stuff. At least you had to wait 30 minutes for a man to come move his car. In parts of USA you would come back and your windows would be smashed and your bag stolen. Don't let your 15+ years of honestly pretty good living make you forget how shit a lot of our home cities are.
2. You got old. Even you mentioned that at the end.
   If you've been here 15+ years, I'm guessing you are pushing 50 if you haven't already passed it. You should probably consider that a lot of this behavior wasn't an issue for you in the past because you were focused on other stuff. 15 years ago you probably didn't even have a car to get sandwiched in with. We all start to look around and lose our tempers more as we age. We all start to want more conformity and social rule following as we age. It's natural. You might just be feeling this manifest more now.

I actually have the opposite opinion of you: I think 15 years ago behavior was worse. More spitting, more smoking, more pushing and shoving, more general lack of regard for rules. Things are a lot more orderly and clean than they were 20 years ago. Driving has always been a shit show here. It feels like it's gotten way better to me. In fact Korea is one of the few places where I feel like progress is still being made. It's slowed, yes, but it's still going up. When I go back home (to USA) I am reminded at how shitty some things have gotten (where there's even more of that "don't speak up" attitude). I'm thankful every time I get on a plane back to here.

It's OK to vent, but after that maybe take a breather and think about how good we have it here. I know it's easy to get stressed with just so many damn people everywhere interfering with your life, but remember that they all feel that way about you too, and they aren't actively trying to screw with you.

Like the other commenter said, you can use basically any payment card inside the HiPass device, but the device itself has to be registered to your particular vehicle. Sounds like it might still be registered to your friend's car. Depending on the model, you can plug it into your PC via USB and use the HiPass website to deregister from friend and reregister it to your car.

Did you get a notification or message about unpaid tolls? It should give you a way to pay through that via bank transfer or etc. If you'd rather do it in person you can visit any HiPass office (unmanned kiosk at most toll gates, or actual staffed office at some bigger ones).

even men are expected to cover up the nips

Can confirm. I made the mistake of wearing a light linen shirt one summer and didn't even realize my (male) nipples were visible through it. Korean (male) friends directly criticized me for it.

I was confused too.

Song based “Past Lives” on her own autobiographical experiences as an immigrant who left her home country at the age of 12. A central theme is “inyeon” — a word meaning something similar to “fate,” which appears in untranslated Korean in the film. “Every Korean understands what ‘inyeon’ refers to, but it’s not a concept that exists overseas,” she explained. “But it was gratifying for me to see audiences sensing and accepting its meaning through the film.”

So I guess the headline is meant to imply that it was "fate" that led audiences to love her movie about "fate".

There is a full actual AdGuard VPN you can buy that is a real VPN but it's an extra payment aside from the normal AdGuard ad blocking service. AdGuard needs some way of intercepting all your traffic to block ads. So it creates a fake VPN that lets it do that. Without rooting your device, that's basically the only way to block stuff.

It's not a real VPN. It just uses a local VPN to filter content. Without it, it won't work.

Bibliogram was good while it lasted. I’m shocked any instances are still up and running after this:

https://cadence.moe/blog/2022-09-01-discontinuing-bibliogram

Also, what's up with Apple Pay getting a triangle mark?

Probably the limitation on actually adding cards to it. In other countries you can add pretty much any credit card or bank card to it. Plus transportation cards.

Ah "Create E-mail digest". I never noticed that feature before, neat.

Do you have AdGuard VPN enabled somehow?

Or are you on Android? Maybe on Android, since there is no Chrome equivalent (that I know of) to Safari's native content-blockers, maybe the AdGuard version for Android can *only* filter ads via a false VPN.

Yes there is.

No clue about that. I do know that I was using Feedbro ("self hosted" as far as being a local-only Chrome extension) which does pull in Instagram, but it was very unreliable (missed posts) and eventually Instagram banned the account for suspicious activity, even though I was only polling Instagram once a day. They likely noticed I was polling one user's feed after another in succession. Even though I artificially limited it to 1 feed at a time. They're that strict.

I'm having an issue like this on iOS 15 but not iOS 17, weirdly.

To handle custom DNS filtering on iOS, the app needs to create a fake VPN. I will assume it's the same on Android. Try it yourself: go ahead and disable the DNS filtering completely. Did the VPN icon go away? I will assume it did.

I can't speak about Android directly, but on iOS, AdGuard can block ads inside Safari by using content blockers, so if you only enabled that, no VPN icon would show. That's available in the free app too. But if you want blocking in other apps you will need to block them at the DNS level which is why it will create a fake VPN (to intercept all your traffic).

There is a way to block ads at DNS level without fake VPN, by using the free AdGuard public DNS settings, but that is not customizable.

Instagram Accounts as RSS

You will never find this. Various tools have come and gone trying to offer this. None of them survive today. Even if they claim to, they will be so unreliable as to be useless.

Oh interesting. Good to know.

What are you referring to here? Longtime Inoreader user but not sure what you mean by digests.

(I was wearing a shoulder free top and I know some elderly people really dont like that),

Irrelevant. Plenty of Korean girls wear something like this and while they would get huge stink eyes from elderly on the train, NONE of them would lay a hand on her. They would know the criminal repercussions for that.

Naver (texting)

Not sure what you are thinking of here.

​

티머니GO [T Money Go]

If you have an iPhone this will be basically useless. You can pay in convenience stores with it, maybe order taxis? I'm not even sure. But you can't use it for beeping into the bus/subway which is 99% of its usefulness on Android.

​

G마켓 [GMarket] (shopping)

No reason to use this if you already have Coupang, IMO.

It happened in Singapore by a Korean national Hyundai worker:

A South Korean engineer saw his inebriated neighbour sleeping by the pool of their serviced apartment compound and tried to rape her.
The 25-year-old woman, an exchange student from Sweden, was shocked when she woke up to find the man on top of her. She repeatedly told him to stop and managed to get away after a scuffle.
On May 13, Cho Tae Kwon, now 51, was sentenced to a jail term of eight years and 4½ months, after he pleaded guilty to one charge each of attempted rape and outrage of modesty.

https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/courts-crime/over-8-years-jail-for-man-who-tried-to-rape-neighbour-who-fell-asleep-by-the-pool

anxiety stemming from concerns about reading efficiency

Ironically, this is exactly why I switched to RSS.

I do not trust an algorithm or AI to decide what topics I would like to see. I don't want AI summarizing my sources for me. I want total personal control. I want to peruse the headlines myself, identify interesting looking items myself, and read them at my leisure to fully digest. Otherwise, I don't really see the benefit of using RSS. If we just want some sort of daily AI summary of chosen topics, I'm sure Google will come out with something like AI-powered Google Alerts soon enough.

Maybe there is an audience for it. Though I do fear that if publishers come to realize that their RSS feeds are essentially workarounds for AI content scrapers to get free non-API access to their content, even if just to present summarized versions, they may shut down those feeds entirely and we human readers will be S.O.L.

Thank you! I thought I had screwed up the update somehow. I've been using it for months on a free account. Suddenly after app update today it's gone.

I asked it to tell me the name of a female politician, and it accused me of sexism and not being sensitive for saying "female" rather than woman.

When I asked it about a "woman politician" it accused me of sexism and suggested I use "female politician."