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
I use water and soap. For everything. Including my hair. Unscented soap with no industrial chemicals to make it "smell good".
I horrify my coworkers when I tell them this. They're convinced my hair is going to fall out, and that my skin will dry out and slough off despite literally years of me not showing any of this.
I'm pretty sure the makeup industry is purely a scam.
It's about the same in terms of what it does (which means it hallucinates just as strongly and can't be trusted). It just takes less to do it. MUCH less.
If I see evidence of AI in any space on a page (aside, obviously, from one that is analyzing AI) I assume that the page has nothing worth reading.
I doubt I will miss anything of value by this assumption.
So I'm with you. Putting AI "art" on an article is just a sign of dishonesty and taints the writing as well.
Yutong makes some kick-ass e-busses. About a third of the buses in Wuhan (maybe more?) are Yutong.
I think even darker (as the response to @[email protected] indicates). When I see incel behaviour from a man, I make damned sure that man is always in my sight and at a distance. And I won't accept any drink from him, nor any invitation to go somewhere else, even if it's in the same building.
Well yes. It's about sex and specifically forcing sex.
They're wannabe rapists, in effect.
There is absolutely a cure for incels, yes, but nobody in the west would like it. So you're kind of stuck with them.
The prostitution thing won't work, though. I actually got fed up with a loud incel peripheral to a social circle I was part of and snapped, offering to hire him a hooker right then and there so he could STFU about how he'd never been laid.
Immediately he moved the goalposts and said he didn't just want to get laid, he wanted a "genuine emotional relationship". Saying this despite for the previous two hours only ever talking about sex, sex appeal, sexual characteristics, etc. with not a word spent on "genuine emotion".
Some people just want to whine, and when they gather in groups they spiral destructively.
The pipes tend to be insulated, the temperatures don't really get very low (coldest I've ever seen is -10° and that was for a couple of hours), and that's at night, and the cold "season" is very short. It takes time to freeze pipes, and here it just doesn't get cold enough to do that.
That's the most polite way I've ever seen of edging away from my obsessive tendencies. 😀
We used, as I said above, a PU (PVC? I don't know, I'm not a polymer expert) sheet the same size as the table to protect the glass under it. 1.5mm is all you need, it rolls up nicely to set aside, and you can put maps and stuff under it to keep it visible but protected.
And the metal dice won't shatter your tabletop like one evil d10 did mine. 😬
Central China. Wuhan to be specific. If you're going to visit, go to the south. It's pleasantly warm in winter. Or bundle up and go north. They heat their homes in the north. It's the poor suckers near the Yangtze that get screwed.
I caught the 2009 total eclipse here and it was awe-inspiring. It was also the longest solar eclipse expected for the 21st century at 6 minutes, 39 seconds, so it made a deep impression on everybody standing on the roof of the apartment block to watch it.
I don't wish to see a second, though, because the next one will be in the year 2200 and that would mean I'd still be alive in 200 years. Not something I want.
I've seen the Aurora Borealis hundreds of times. (Living in the high arctic does that to you.) But I have heard them only once.
I'd like to hear them again.
Usually only the one, but if I'm going to run a game I'll bring several sets because there's always someone (possibly more than one) who doesn't have one.
And yes, there's no insulation anywhere here. The walls are mostly concrete (with plaster, etc. over top, natch) and when cold weather hits actively start to radiate cold. (I know, I know, technically they're sucking heat out, but it FEELS radiative!). All the windows are single-glaze and they're not particularly well-sealed either, so drafts are common.
Blue is supposed to be the colour, yes. The verbiage is that "blue is an ancient symbol—dating back to Ancient Rome—representing love, purity, and fidelity". This is, however, absolute poppycock. Blue was a symbol of fidelity, this is true, but to the emperor, not in love. And indeed there is no single colour that symbolizes all three things in Roman times.
White symbolized purity and innocence. Yellow represented marriage and fidelity. Red represented violence (Mars), yes, but also passion and love. Green represented beauty, fertility, and love. Purple represented passion, but chiefly reserved for the royal classes.
Blue was not related to any kind of love symbolism whatsoever. The Victorians just made stuff up. Again. Like the so-called "medieval" torture devices (like iron maidens, etc.)
Central heating (and insulation) is not common here. And cold weather rarely lasts longer than two weeks. We make do with small space heaters at need and I've got the space heater I'm using under my desk right now, keeping my legs nice and toasty. But the thick wooden desk is insulating quite well from the heat source, sadly.
3D printing in metals of various kinds is pretty common these days.
As the proud (and almost exclusive) user of metal dice¹, however, let me warn you that metal dice have a few problems.
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As others have noted, you can really scar the wood of tables. What they didn't note is that they can also, if they land just wrong, break glass. I have a nice coffee table that had a glass overlay about 5mm thick or so. (Note the past tense.) One of my d10s landed JUST WRONG, apparently on a hidden flaw that left a stress point, and that lovely glass overlay broke into three large shards. Replacing that was too expensive for my tastes. The solution was to buy a transparent PU (I think?) cover to the same dimensions—only 1.5mm thick was more than enough—and always unroll that over the replacement glass. But you have to be aware of just how damaging metal dice can be. (Other alternatives include using dice towers, rolling bowls, etc., but the PU cover has an added bonus of letting you put key documents, maps, etc. under it for quick reference without worrying about getting pizza grease on it.
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They're heavy. Indeed that's part of their appeal, but if you carry multiple sets it can get a bit unpleasant. Sometimes my purse feels like I'm carrying several sets of knuckle dusters or something.
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This is one I haven't heard comments on, but they get very cold in chill environments. Were I playing today (3°C at my desk at the moment) I'd use plastic dice.
¹ E.g.: https://i.imgur.com/X11DeQ2.jpg
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.
I used to rail against tautologies, but finally came to accept them.
They are, after all, what they are.
Four people died after a Tesla crashed and burst into flames, while a fifth person narrowly escaped after a bystander broke open a window.
Vance said it was "insane that we would support a military alliance if that military alliance isn't going to be pro-free speech."
It's time for the EU to grow up and give the USA its walking papers. I mean it's not as if the USA has been even remotely helpful as NATO countries face their greatest threat since the Soviet Union.
Throughout all of its history the USA has been an unreliable ally. Whoever banks on US support loses in the long term as the fickle US electorate changes flips its lid every 4-8 years and drastically rewrites the script as to who is a friend and who is an enemy.
And the script for the next four years says autocrats and other such assholes are the friends, and they're willing to throw the previous friends' bodies under the bus to prop up a failing business enterprise run by a crony.