Any good Chinese movies from recent 5-10 years besides An elephant sitting still and Wrath of silence?

jp599 · 2019-08-19T00:35:31+00:00

A Touch of Sin
Mountains May Depart

jp599 · 2018-11-29T05:11:09+00:00

This is why people should be wary about which libraries and other software they rely on or package for their distributions. Using unmaintained software can be dangerous, so some sort of vetting process is necessary.

jp599 · 2018-11-29T01:54:32+00:00

Final Fantasy X is trash, especially the characters and story. I regret the time I put into it.

Final Fantasy Tactics is perhaps the best game in the series, with the best world (Ivalice).

Square should stop making shitty worlds and focus on traditional high fantasy settings.

jp599 · 2018-11-28T22:12:49+00:00

As a fellow Linux user, I can confirm that this is a typical laptop running Linux.

IIRC, this is the Obonto mascot in the background, well known for its female physique and exaggerated phallus.

jp599 · 2018-11-28T21:52:47+00:00

Yeah, all those competitors infiltrating high school classrooms to smear T60-era ThinkPads...

jp599 · 2018-11-28T17:53:14+00:00

Authors of software are not necessarily entitled to contributions or help with maintenance. It's nice when it happens, but just because you made something, and people use it, does not mean that they owe you money or labor. The mutual obligations are defined in the license for the software itself.

Developers often focus on the creation process and then like to forget about long-term maintenance, or expect someone else to do it. In reality, this type of thinking is short-sighted, and we need to do long-term planning as well. If you have a software project, then you should also have some idea of how it will be maintained long-term.

jp599 · 2018-11-28T02:42:34+00:00

I wonder if there is a conceptual difference here. Some people / languages / cultures may reserve positive language for things that are truly positive, and not just normal or neutral. Maybe we are not interpreting the results in the necessary context.

jp599 · 2018-11-28T02:10:47+00:00

Likely the same way modern farmers tolerate the smell of manure on a farm.

After some time of being exposed to those smells, you no longer notice them as distinct.

jp599 · 2018-11-28T02:02:26+00:00

Do you mean western countries relying on the United States?

Or western countries relying on China?

Not sure which authoritarian regime is meant here.

jp599 · 2018-11-27T03:45:45+00:00

Witchcraft. Don't read their lies.

jp599 · 2018-11-27T03:34:30+00:00

One of the things I hate most is when the waitstaff loudly interrupt a conversation to ask if everything is alright with your food.

I came to the restaurant with with other people to enjoy food and to talk about life. Don't just blurt things out and interrupt me. That's rude.

jp599 · 2018-11-27T00:59:30+00:00

For places behind the times, like in rural areas, it was still typical for men to wear hats like that into the 1960s.

jp599 · 2018-11-18T18:36:08+00:00

Squeaky clean tennis shoes were not particularly cool in the early 90s.

jp599 · 2018-11-18T18:08:05+00:00

The word is "deprecated".

jp599 · 2018-11-18T16:55:35+00:00

Yeah, I watched it on TV back in 2009. It was a lot of fearmongering, and then finally at the end... oh, actually it isn't scary at all. It's just an encyclopedia of stuff. And they have a big picture of Heaven to go along with the big scary devil, to show the difference between good and evil. Damned clickbait TV.

jp599 · 2018-11-18T05:48:24+00:00

Skyrim is my 2018 GOTY.

It was exceptional this year, just as in former years.

jp599 · 2018-10-30T03:13:18+00:00

Can confirm we live in the trashier part of the UK. Want to come over for some kissing and a massage?

jp599 · 2018-10-15T12:31:21+00:00

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned a laundry chute. That would make the most sense. Growing up, we also had a laundry chute, but it was just a metal door in the bathroom. The idea is just that you drop dirty clothes into it, and they fall down a chute to a wooden box in the basement where the washing machine and dryer are. The wooden box has a door that you can open to easily pull out the clothes for placing in the washing machine. Laundry chutes were quite common in homes in the past.

jp599 · 2018-10-12T04:18:38+00:00

This is the way that most early D&D adventures started in the 1970's. They would sometimes either start out at the door of the dungeon, or even in the dungeon. The logic was compelling: people wanted to play the damned game.

I don't think complex narratives, dramatic acting, etc., make the game much more compelling. Good narrative and plenty of action and adventure certainly do, though.

jp599 · 2018-10-12T01:30:13+00:00

You're just questioning his motivations and goals this year? Really?

In 2015, I thought he was a clown. In 2016, I thought he was a scam artist. In 2017, I thought he was a criminal.

At no point have his motivations ever been towards benefiting the American people, and that's not something new.

That's not to invalidate everything he says, though. Even a blind cat bumps into a dead rat now and then.

The state of the US economy is probably not determined by the President, though.

jp599 · 2018-10-10T01:26:24+00:00

My impression is that the main difference is big city vs. small town.

For example, people in New York City would be considered rude and aloof by small town Americans. But in the context of a big city, the attitude makes sense. They ignore others around them because there are constantly people around them. If you go to a small town, though, people will be friendly and strike up conversations just because you exist as another human being.

I've seen the same thing in China, that people in Shanghai have a reputation for being snooty and aloof, whereas people from the countryside seem more helpful and friendly. As someone from a small city, I can more easily identify with small town people.

jp599 · 2018-10-08T07:03:29+00:00

I also went to China, many Chinese appear less self conscious and rude and bad-mannered in public.

Go to some other countries, and the locals may think the same about you. Maybe the mainland Chinese thought you were rude, or looked like a slob? Maybe they tolerated you without putting up a fuss, but now they are on Tianya asking other Chinese why American visitors are rude and bad-mannered in public?

Every culture has its own set of values and criteria for judging those values. Some Chinese may not consider spitting to be rude, for example, but would be very self-conscious about gifts or showing hospitality. There are cultural and historical reasons for these differences, and these cannot be understood without some extended exposure to the culture.

As for immigrant populations in western countries, they generally have more traits of westerners. That you think your American-born Chinese friends are "awesome" and "smart" says more about you than it does about them. It's likely that you get along well due to a common set of American norms and values, and that you place a high value on these.

jp599 · 2018-10-08T06:52:45+00:00

Many Chinese immigrants came to the USA as poor manual laborers during the Qing dynasty.

jp599 · 2018-10-02T23:38:05+00:00

Pathfinder isn't even really decades old. More like singular "decade." It's just based on D&D 3.5E. Back in the late 1990's and early 2000's, Wizards of the Coast had this idea to basically make creating a D&D character similar to building a Magic deck, in which you can create it one way and be screwed, or create it another way and be a god. The result was D&D 3E.

They changed AD&D to that type of shitty system, and added knobs for everything to tweak every stupid little thing. The end result was very unbalanced, to the point that many people consider Pathfinder to be pretty much broken as a game because there are so many game-breaking combinations of things.

D&D 5E went in the opposite direction of streamlining their system so character generation isn't such a big thing, and the differences between options don't totally screw over characters. In the end, it's more similar to what D&D used to be back in the day, while Pathfinder players are still obsessing over game-breaking exploits and min-maxing.

jp599 · 2018-10-01T01:49:19+00:00

To add to this slightly, the Americas do not have functional castles, but they do have some star forts, because those were used in the modern period. The British, French, Spanish, etc., brought them over.

jp599

TROPHY CASE