Best posts made by WTFE

I wasn't joking. That "Ghetto Air" project is dirt cheap (both to make and to run) and surprisingly effective. If you're a bit more mechanically inclined and have a bit more spending money, there's a slightly more upscale version available.

@AmishRakeFight said:

@Sunny

In the most innocent of intentions, I can totally see wanting your mother's wedding ring after she passes away. However, that all gets shot in the face when you take it off her immediately after she dies. Gross. Gross. Gross. Wow. I'm sorry.

I took my father's wedding ring off his finger within minutes of his dying. (Or so I'm told. I have no memory of this. There's a bit of emotional trauma fucking with my memories of the time.) Of course this is because my mother couldn't do it. I had to take it off for her and give it to her.

But…

Why do the son and the daughter-in-law think they have a claim on the wedding ring over the husband who actually fucking bought the thing and was wed with the woman? These people need 9mm parabellum of pain relief straight into the brainpan.

@Shebakoby said:

Some Canadians actually have to go have important tests (MRI, for instance) in the USA because the waiting list for the same test in Canada is over 2 years now.

Ah, this old Tea Party shibboleth.

No. No, this is flatly untrue. If you want an MRI test against the advice of your doctor, then yes, you'll wait forever. But when my father had his stroke, in the depths of the wilds of B.C. (Prince George), he was in the MRI in under four hours.

I call Tea Party bullshit here.

People who need knee replacements have had to endure even longer waits (up to 5 years).

Docs or it didn't happen. ("I saw it on Fox" doesn't count as docs, just to be clear. Hell, "I saw it on an American news channel" doesn't count as docs.)

People have died of cancer before they could get some kinds of tests.

Yeah. If you don't go to your doctor for twenty-five years and come in when the cancer has already passed the point of no return, you're probably fucked. You'd be fucked in the USA too, but at least your wallet will be hoovered clean first.

So again, "docs or it didn't happen". (And again, "Fox News" or American news in general doesn't count.)

This was lunch:

I washed it down with:

The "ignore" function I use is "if the name and icon at the left is someone who's a gibbering idiot, skip to the next one".

I posted a random link to Wuhan's AQUAPOCALYPSE yesterday. Since I live on a hill (the ominously-named "flood hill" … we in the trade like to call this "foreshadowing"), the flood had minimal and mostly comical impact on me.
As you can see from the photo, however, that's not true of the whole city:

That was downtown Wuhan yesterday. Near Zhongshan Park and right in the middle of the commercial district. This is the worst flood to hit the city in 50 years.

So why is this in the "RL things I love" category?

• Nobody died. Seriously. Torrential rainfall that at its peak exceeded 66mm per hour; that left buses partially submerged and cars fully submerged; that let people swim in the streets and even go fishing (with umbrellas!) in them; all of that and nobody died.
• Nobody whined. The general reaction of the citizenry was to either get out and help (like the cleaning lady at a university that helped stranded students get to the bus by carrying them on her back!), or it was to go out and play and laugh and generally enjoy the fuck out of nature being a classic grade A bitch.
• It's getting cleaned up by a host of volunteers. Yes, the PLA is in doing its usual thing, but so are all the out-of-town students who're in town for the summer visiting family for vacation. And so are construction workers and housewives and a myriad of others.

Here are a few more pictures to entertain:

I wasn't kidding about submerged cars.

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This guy is one bad-ass bicyclist!

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I guess that's one way to do it…

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Who said chivalry is dead?

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Flood waters falling.

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They have a submarine engineering facility in Wuhan. You can tell, can't you?

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The Lara Croft on the right has thunder thighs and hips way wider than her shoulders. I'm not holding up the one on the left as especially realistic. (It's a fucking cartoon caricature in a game, after all!) I'm saying that the one on the right is perhaps an American's (or Brit's or Canadian's) idea of "realistic" in that the three fattest major nations on the planet would tend to see that.

And note, I'm also emphatically not saying that everybody should look like the one on the left (even in non-caricature form) nor that someone who looks like the one on the right is somehow a bad person. I'm saying that erasing the one on the left as if people like this don't exist is a bad thing.

@Roz said:

Either way, it's not equally bad or worse, since fat-shaming is connected to actual discrimination, which reduction of portrayals of thin women in media is not.

But you know what is actual discrimination? The backlash of "thin-shaming" that I've increasingly seen over the past decade. If we're to go with the typical shit I see in certain political circles, my wife is unhealthily thin. She's probably bulimic, the narrative goes, or at the very least anorexic. (Yes, I've had assholes have the nerve to say this in response to photographs that have my wife in them.) Never mind that she's one of approximately 600 million people for whom this is ordinary weight and build (along with that chick in the flood pic). They seem to utterly miss the point (big surprise there!) that fat shaming is bad because body shaming in general is bad.

Shaming people for their body, whether fat, thin, tall, short, long-fingered, stubby-fingered, dark-skinned, light-skinned, blue-eyed, black-eyed, etc. etc. etc. ad nauseum is bad. Period. The fact that currently one body type is in vogue in media (thin) is not an excuse to dump on people who hold that body type. Fat people mocking thin people is just as bad as the opposite. Indeed I'd argue that it's worse because fat people are on the receiving end of such barbs a whole lot (trust me!), frequently being held up as examples of people with "poor self-discipline" and some form of "moral failure" and thus should know better how hurtful and unjust it is.

Demanding that all media everywhere match three fat nations' conceptions of normalcy is an additional pile of idiocy atop all that, especially when you get what would amount to "Thunder Thighs Croft" waddling around athletically through mazes and traps….

I'm sorry @Insomnia, but your father is a monster. I would strongly recommend putting him down for the good of humanity.

@Coin said:

I leave this here with no comment or opinion other than "Wow".

Then let me expand.

This is typical Kotaku (and other) writing in that it is short on facts, short on any kind of fact checking, short on reality. It's just like the "facekini" shit that littered the net a few years back in that it took a "trend" that was so minimal people in the same city as where the trend was purportedly rising had no fucking clue that such a trend existed.

This is typical "hurr hurr hurr them furrners shoor is funnAY" reportage. The evidence against it comes from the article itself. "...An HR manager at an internet company in China..." Could that be any more vague? How 'bout you name the "Internet company in China"? Or the HR manager, for that matter. The entire article is long on speculation and short on fact. (Their attempt to pretend to highlight this themselves exacerbates the problem rather than mitigating it.)

Anybody involved in writing, editing, or publishing a pile of shit like that deserves to work at Kotaku.

So, in the "what do you collect" thread I mentioned "Chinese board wargames". My latest acquisition arrived on Thursday. The best part of said acquisition is that it was free! The designer and publisher sent me a free copy. Just because I'm me.[1]

You can get the details of the game in the linked album, but the overview is here:

[1]OK, that and maybe because I kind of promised I'd translate the rules to English for him. But mostly because it's me and I'm the kind of guy people send free games to.

I decided that I should show the other games I've made photo-essays of.

While the first game I showed was of naval engagements in the First Sino-Japanese War (which, given what a humilation that was for China, makes this a very unusual topic for a wargame published in China), and while it is the first game by this particular person that was professionally published (by a publication company he co-founded specifically to publish it), it was not the first game he ever produced. Before this (very nice) one he self-published two other games with equally interesting and oddball topics.

The first of these two earlier games is Nanchang Uprising, a game of the titular battle that marked the first engagement of the Chinese Civil War in 1927.

Very unusually for a board wargame, the playing pieces are cut out of sheet magnet and the board is metal-backed (and yet not much heavier than a traditional cardboard playing surface). This is something I wish more wargames did.

The second of these earlier self-published works is the far more ambitious Four Crossings of Chishui. This is a major engagement that is bizarrely unheard of outside of China despite the fact that it has quite literally changed the course of world history in an earth-shattering (albeit slow-motion) way. Even the Wikipedia article on the Long March manages to overlook it.

Brief synopsis: after the Long March, the Red Army performed a grueling set of maneuvers that involved crossing a treacherous stretch of one of the Yangtze's tributaries four times in a brilliant set of battles that effectively slices and dices the Republican Army into ratshit, thus giving the Red Army their first major victory and turning the tide of the Civil War. Without this battle, the Reds would not have won China and we'd be looking at a drastically different world today.

(If you want to know more, listen to the first track of this album. You'll have to learn Mandarin first, mind…)

As with the previous game, the pieces are magnetic and one of the game boards is metallic. This metallic board is a small version of the much larger paper (sadly not card stock) map. The reason for this is that the communist forces do their movements on the smaller, magnetic map for purposes of hidden movements. They're transferred to the open map that both sides can see only once detected (usually when they attack something). It's an interesting mechanism I'd like to try out in actual play sometime.

The final game I've got a photo-essay done for is a completely different style in many dimensions than the previous three. This one is about The Chu-Hand Contention, which is an ancient war that was in its own way a historic game-changer.

See the Chu are one of the odder, and yet highly influential, cultures of ancient China. And this game is of interest to me because I live in the heart of what was once the Kingdom of Chu. The people here are … different. The Chu have always been the vaguely artistic, vaguely decadent cultural engine that influenced all of the rest of China over the ages. When they were their own kingdom they were the mildly corrupt, very wealthy, highly decadent aesthetes to the warrior kingdoms around them. They only survived as long as they did because they were rich enough to hire the best soldiers.

After the Qin escapade made the first actual quasi-unified nation in the space that is now called China (after said Qin), in its ensuing collapse two major contenders showed up to take the Qin's place. One was an offset of the Chu peoples, the other the Han. The Han won and went on to create what is effectively the basis of all subsequent Chinese culture.

As with the "four crossings" battle, the Chu-Han Contention would have made for a dramatically different world had the opposing side won. It is thus a very good subject for a decent wargame—which this one seems to be.

(As an oddity, although published in the mainland by a Beijing designer and publisher, it's printed in traditional characters. This is killing me in translating the rules.)

A friend helps you move.
A true friend helps you move the body.

They helped you move? They're friends.

@Ganymede said in RL things I love:

@Auspice said in RL things I love:

Just the once.

....so far

I'll get the lye.

Lye? Man, I've been using quicklime. Did I err?

@Auspice said in RL things I love:

@WTFE

I am jealous of your collection. I have 70+ decks of cards, but none so wild as this. I need your sources!

http://www.taobao.com

Some of them can probably be had from http://www.aliexpress.com. (I know the PVC playing cards can. Probably the Majiang cards too. I don't know about the more culturally obscure ones.)

@Thenomain said in RL things I love:

@WTFE

I cannot imagine ruffle-shuffling those.

Shuffling those I've seen two variants: dump 'em on a table face-down and mix them up by stirring, and hold half of them in each hand at the bottom and interpenetrate at the tips.

The stirring shuffle works better than a riffle, but takes a lot of space and time. The interpenetration one is about the same as a riffle but takes skill to pull off. Skill I currently lack.

@Auspice said in RL things I love:

@WTFE

I am jealous of your collection. I have 70+ decks of cards, but none so wild as this. I need your sources!

OK, I did some digging.

A general AliExpress search for PVC cards led me to this set of the weirder cards in under a minute. This leads me to believe you won't have too many problems finding interesting card decks there.

You may thank me for your bankruptcy later.

I like my tea best tightly compressed and aged (often after a fungal infection) for anywhere from three years to two decades or so. Both of the teas I'm drinking now are in this photo:

The disc on the left is 1kg of "snow bud tea", which is old-growth trees with the spring buds hand-picked off of them. This is three year old "raw" tea and it looks like this unpacked:

The other is a four year old "raw" tea too, but one that was fungally infected so that it ferments slowly. At four years of age it's begun to pick up the earthy taste that is the appeal of this tea. Were I a patient sort I'd keep this stored until it's at least ten years of age, but I'm not such a sort so I won't.

My employer-off-the-record has taken us to a corporate retreat for Mid-Autumn Festival. I love the place and I haven't even seen the sights yet.

You bastard! Now I have to find these!

Canadian companies (NOT just communications ones!) are skeezy because Canadians are sheep. All it would take is people as a group living without, say, cable for a year and watch Rogers and company collapse to demands. But that would involve actually DOING something and this is not the Canadian Way.