My Dearest Sinophobes:
Your knee-jerk downvoting of anything that features any hint of Chinese content doesn't hurt my feelings. It just makes me point an laugh, Nelson Muntz style as you demonstrate time and again just how weak American snowflake culture really is.
Hugs & Kisses, 张殿李
Don't waste your breath on the Apartheid Manchild servicers. Especially the ones who can't read.
The accident was the drunken driver.
The fact that they couldn't get to the trapped victims was the Cybertruck.
I'm not sure which part of this is confusing.
ABBA's "Fernando" pops up in my head randomly all the time. Styx's "Half-Penny, Two-Penny" has a phrase that leaps to mind quite often when reading news. "Justice for money, what can you say? We all know it's the American Way." and also "Justice for money, how much more can I pay? We all know it's the American Way." And when that leaps to mind the rest of the song follows. Forever (or so it seems)...
I had a similar arc, only I was introduced to it with D&D/AD&D in the '70s.
Today I don't play D&D or any of its derivatives, though.
The first system I played was the 1977 Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set, which I tried with a cousin in 1978, but the first one I owned was Advanced Dungeons & Dragons which I purchased in 1980 or 1981.
As a child I had a problem pronouncing "chocolate" so I called it "drawer".
This makes more sense to people who know German since that's what I was using at the time.
Self-driving Tesla is a big boy now! Almost ready to put on its big boy pants!
I want to get some of the local magpies to start eating out of my hand by summer time.
I was nearly frantic trying to find my glasses once. I enlisted the aid of SO (who complied, but was smirking for reasons that would soon become obvious). While I was digging around in places it could have fallen, I mentioned that it would be so much easier if I could actually see clearly while doing this.
Then I had a brainstorm. I took my glasses out of my blouse's front pocket and put them on so I could see more clearly if my glasses had fallen behind the desk...
You're conflating two different things:
- Getting games printed in China.
- Chinese counterfeit game publication.
#1 is not going to stop happening anytime soon. I saw this in a recent trip to Canada where I wanted to get some jigsaw puzzles with native art on them for friends. There were 500-piece sets manufactured in, I think, Seattle that were three times the price of 1000-piece sets manufactured in China. Yet buying one of each and taking a look at the contents there was little difference in the pieces. (The American-made one was a fraction of a millimetre thicker, but for that the cutting looked more accurate in the Chinese one. The pieces just fit better.)
#2 can be stopped, but would take intrusive border checks that most American businesses would absolutely not stand for.
Could do with learning some more card games. I love that you can play so much without having to buy anything new with them.
This, however, is anathema to an industry which is why you get card games that are thinly papered-over traditional playing card games with relabelled cards and slightly-altered rules. (Think Uno: the commercial wrapper around Crazy Eights.)
There are hundreds—or even thousands—of traditional games out there, playable with simple, ubiquitous playing pieces (like poker decks, small coloured stones/markers/whatever, and simply drawn boards on paper). So if the industry collapses you can keep playing new(-to-you) games for the rest of your life without running out.
Today started as a Heilung day and ended with Burning Witches. I'll probably fall asleep to the former.
A literal Space Nazi writes a book in which the ruler of Mars (albeit democratically elected) is called "Elon", after whom Errol Musk's next loin turd is named, and said loin turd is obsessed with Mars. And being a Nazi.
What. A. Coincidence.
- "Realistic" Fantasy: Chivalry & Sorcery
- High Fantasy: HARP
- Space Opera: Space Opera
- Science Fiction: CORPS or EABA
- Dieselpunk: Tomorrow City
- Modern: CORPS or BRP
- General Purpose: Spark, FATE (typically Accelerated Edition), EABA, or a BRP hack
Way back in prehistory I played Car Wars when it first came out. (You know, before it became an unwieldy, badly-organized mess that rivalled even Star Fleet Battles for being impossible for normal folk to play.)
We missed one very key rule. The "damage" rating for weapons was a number of d6 to roll for damage. We played it as individual points.
Needless to say even the shortest auto duels were horrifically and painfully long to play out.
They bounced three. In one of those links they cited SIXTEEN who openly used Nazi symbolism just in their avatars and whatnot.
Substack is still a Nazi bar.
But of course you didn't bother to check, did you?
You've (collective) got the information. And the solution to it, no less, in the last link. What you (collective) choose to do about it is on your head. But given what I've seen in the USA's so-called "left" you're going to cheerfully continue using a service that profits from Nazis.
You do you, boo.
I'm pretty sure that my point was clear: "never" is a very fucking long time when it is already happening.
But sure, go get your feelings hurt. Buhbye.
Substack is a leftist platform? Since when?
- https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/11/substack-extremism-nazi-white-supremacy-newsletters/676156/
- https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/09/substack-nazi-content-policies-controversy/
- https://www.theverge.com/24040685/substack-newsletters-nazi-content-moderation-policy
- https://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/substackers-against-nazis
- https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/22/business/substack-nazis-content-moderation.html
There's more. Many more. And a list of literal (as in swastika-flaunting) Nazis being hosted on Substack would be far longer. (Oh, and you might want to have a look at the dates on those articles. This is not new information.)
What do you call a bar, again, that lets Nazis openly associate? And what do you call the other patrons also in it?
Maybe the non-Nazis should read this: https://ghost.org/docs/migration/substack/
Realities on the ground outside of the USA say otherwise. Here, for example, after a huge push toward ownership of individual vehicles, an ever-increasing proportion of those vehicles are permanently parked. Outside my window, for example, there's a square that is filled with cars parked bumper to bumper that haven't moved in the past year or two. Technically they're owned and would certainly be counted in ownership statistics, but it is physically impossible for any but the four cars at the end of the square to even be taken out of the lot.
Why?
Because the advantage of private ownership has been whittled away slowly but steadily over the past 20 years.
There was a time that a private vehicle was the only practical means to cross the two rivers (Han and Yangtze) that divide the city. Buses of the time were hideously uncomfortable, highly unreliable, and painfully slow. Going from my home to the then-largest park in the city (Zhongshan park) was a good 2.5-3 hour trip by bus. By car, even through traffic jams (which buses had to go through as well, obviously), it was 1-1.5 hours instead.
Today that same trip is slightly lower by car (cut off about fifteen minutes because of the Yangtze tunnel) but by metro it's about 25 minutes. And you don't have to hunt around for increasingly rare parking, then pay for that parking on top of it. And then repeat that when you get back home. More and more people aren't bothering to drive at all, leaving their cars in long-term parking "just in case" and that case never comes.
Personally I haven't owned an automobile since the second line of the Wuhan Metro opened, and the bus service got upgraded to serve it. There's no point. The rare times I need to use a personal vehicle in specific, taxi services are more than sufficient. For the price of a car I could use, after all, a taxi to go from one end of the city to the other and back every day. For two years. That very infrequent case of needing a taxi is a trivial expense compared to just the purchase price of a car (not including insurance, maintenance, fuel/electricity, etc. etc. etc.).
So "never" is a really long time that's ending as I watch.
Why do Norway's naval vessels have bar codes on the bottom?
So when they return to port they can just Scandinavian.
explanation if needed
"scan the navy in"
Let's add one more thing to the long list of things the Apartheid Manchild doesn't understand, I guess.
Apparently he doesn't understand cyberpunk either, which explains so much about him.
More than 1,300 scientists have signed a letter calling on the world’s oldest science society to reassess the billionaire’s membership following cuts to US science.
If only this were instead him being revoked membership in Society in general.
Elon Musk has admitted he wishes he could get pregnant — and fortunately, his in-house AI can make that fantasy a reality.
The noted anti-trans Apartheid Manchild wants to have babies?
51 seconds. Two subways. THIS is proper public transit!
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From the time a full subway car leaves a Beijing metro station to the time the next one takes its place is 51 seconds.
Here in Wuhan it ranges from 2 minutes to 5 minutes depending on the line and time of day. In Beijing it's 51 seconds.
Wow.
NGL, i'm kinda jealous.
You know what's fun? Asking a Degenerative AI for help in destroying it.
Recalling that LLMs have no notion of reality and thus no way to map what they're saying to things that are real, you can actually put an LLM to use in destroying itself.
The line of attack that this one helped me do is a "Tlön/Uqbar" style of attack: make up information that is clearly labelled as bullshit (something the bot won't understand) with the LLM's help, spread it around to others who use the same LLM to rewrite, summarize, etc. the information (keeping the warning that everything past this point is bullshit), and wait for the LLM's training data to get updated with the new information. All the while ask questions about the bullshit data to raise the bullshit's priority in their front-end so there's a greater chance of that bullshit being hallucinated in the answers.
If enough people worked on the same set, we could poison a given LLM's training data (and likely many more since they all suck at the same social teat for their data).
黑麒 - 黄河 (2015)
This band is the second Chinese folk metal band I encountered. I was expecting something more like things along the line of 小雨 (Mysterain) when I started listening—which is to say symphonic folk metal—and instead I got … this.
In short I got my mind blown.
This band started my dive into Chinese metal culture, and what I like best about this song, the one that started that dive (or perhaps that pushed me into the deep end of the pool) is that it showed the astonishing diversity of the scene. This is straight-up blackened death metal mixed in cunning ways with traditional Chinese melodies and instrumentation that gives it a unique voice of its own that very few others can match. (葬尸湖/Zuriaake is probably the only other band that can compare in this regard, though less on the instrumentation and more on the melody lines and lyrical content.)
And, not gonna lie, I love watching the faces of westerners when the dan voice kicks in. The "WTAF!?" look just makes me laugh and laugh.
汤显祖 -《牡丹亭·游园惊梦》 (1598)
Tang Xianzu is called "The Shakespeare of China". I think this is grossly inaccurate. I think he's a far more talented artist than Shakespeare, mastering not only prose, poetry and dialogue like Shakespeare, but also musical and libretto composition. The masterwork he's most known for, and the one generally considered his best, is 牡丹亭/The Peony Pavilion, a stirring multi-day tour de force of the performing arts. (Because I'm <sarcasm>a rebel and a loner</sarcasm> I actually personally prefer his 南柯记/Record of the Southern Bough, but The Peony Pavilion is really good too.)
This particular piece is a 皂罗袍 (no translation, really, but transliterated Zao Luo Pao) structured element and is a pivotal moment in the 昆曲/Kunqu opera. It is strongly emotionally charged as the lead character 杜丽娘/Du Liniang has her emotions stirred by the garden's scenery which transforms to romantic thoughts. It is the lead-in to the (very steamy!) dream encounter with 柳梦梅/Liu Mengmei and this results in the rest of the events of the play.
There are several reasons why I adore this particular piece:
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I'm a fan of Kunqu in general. It is the Chinese operatic form that retains the most relevance to China, despite being its oldest surviving form. This is because most other opera forms have become sterile, courtly affairs that simply recycle music and technique while Kunqu, as an entertainment form of the people, is constantly being rejuvenated as it incorporates the ever-changing culture of the folk around it. (Modern kunqu pieces have, in addition to the traditional vocalization and instrumentation, also incorporated synthesizers, modern drum kits, and even autotune distortions.)
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Though this is not my favourite Kunqu (that one is 憐香伴/The Fragrant Companion, an openly sapphic work from 1651), or even my favourite one from Tang Xianzu (that is, as I said, Record of the Southern Bough), it is still a piece I thoroughly enjoy both reading and listening to various aria collections from.
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This piece is a perfect embodiment of the emotional essence of the entire play.
In addition, I greatly enjoy this particular adaptation of it by the Zide Qinshe group.
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By stripping instrumentation down to only a 古琴/guqin accompaniment to the vocals, it lets the voice shine out as the accompaniment subtly supports it and carries the tune forward.
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The guqin player, 白无瑕/Bai Wuxia, is one of my favourite guqin performers capable of some astonishing subtleties on that already-subtle instrument.
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The singer, 钱瑜婷/Qian Yuting (a.k.a. Sunshine), has a gorgeous voice under incredibly tight control.
Traditional - 十面埋伏 (16th century/19th century)
十面埋伏 (trans: Ambush from All Sides) is a 琵琶 (pípá or "Chinese lute") long form solo composition dating in its first form from the 16th century, but whose current popular form stems from a 19th century publication of collected pipa works. It's written in the 武 (wǔ or martial) style¹ and is a sweeping sonic depiction of the Battle of Gaixia, the final major battle of the Chu-Han Contention, in 202BCE.
This is one of the most demanding and complicated pieces in pipa canon that strains the player's ability in every possible performance technique; if you're listening to someone playing it you're almost certainly listening to a virtuoso performer. Personally I love it because:
- Its composition is top notch and evokes the battle it portrays with vivid musicality.
- I admire listening to virtuoso players of any instrument.
- I like the sound of the pipa in general.
The performance linked to is considered one of the ultimate performances; Liu Fang is, as is required to play this piece at all, a virtuoso but she adds a dimension of passion to the piece rarely heard in the staid world of Chinese classical music.
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¹ As opposed to the 文 (wén or civil) style, which tends to be more bucolic in theme and style.
Republicans removed funding for child cancer research from a new version of a bill to fund the government after Elon Musk torpedoed the previous deal.
Hey, Luigi! I have your next target.
