Over the weekend I got utterly addicted to this Korean chat site called gagalive. It's a text-only chat site where you get matched up with strangers like Omegle or Chat Roulette, but it's a Korean site and the audience is pretty much 100% Korean. Every time I got to chat with someone, they would be blown away when they found out I wasn't Korean. I got addicted to the glaze. "I've never seen a foreigner as good at Korean as you", or "you're better than the students at SNU". I even had two people who thought I was lying about being American - one guy, I talked to for 40 minutes and he didn't believe me until the very end.

I didn't make this post to brag as much as I did to make a satisfying "immersion worked"¹ post after almost 3 years, since I jumped into this process/journey out of nowhere and have not really done so much output until this weekend.

The big downside in that experience, though, was the grueling grind to find someone who isn't just a man looking for a woman to talk to². So I had Claude write up a clone for me with gender+topic filtering. I specifically asked it to design it in a mid-late 2000s style, and it spit out this beauty on me:

Now, I'm not really interested in making myself liable (legally and spiritually) for the potential horrible things that can happen on those websites, so unfortunately it's nothing more than a fun artifact stuck on my PC.

But, it did inspire me to redesign my homepage in a similar fashion, so here we are! Hopefully it's less of an eye-sore than the previous "design" which I lazily put together by hand.