Posts made by WTFE

I know all y'all want to be kept up to date on my bizarre card obsession, so the latest deck is there to see.

Paper 四色牌 (Four Colour Cards)
Cheap and nasty as God intended. These cards date from a time when gambling was illegal so cards had to be made cheaply and easy to dispose of. The manufacturer of this set is keeping to that tradition. (How cheap? About a buck fifty -- after shipping!) The cards are marked with the names of 象棋 (Chinese Chess) pieces: four of each in each colour suit. Games played with this deck are typically 麻将 (or Rummy, if you must) style.

I so want one of these:

Has "youth outreach" like this EVER worked ANYWHERE in recorded human history?

@tek said in Tulpas or Roleplaying?:

@BetterJudgment ...Second Life is still a thing?

It will always be a thing. It is the game for those who lack a first.

@Misadventure said in The 100: The Mush:

So you have a hot button.

You assume something, and won't change that assumption if told otherwise?

That's on you, not the English language.

It very much is the English language.

"I'm sorry that you took it that way" is very obviously blame-shifting. Parse the fucking grammar, dude: It starts with "I'm sorry", sure, but then the subject shifts: to "you". After that it's all on "you". This is almost canonical blame-shifting that is so obvious that I suspect my former ESL students would spot it, and they're fucking incompetents grammatically speaking!

If you want to actually express regret for a reaction, there's a myriad of non-blame-shifting ways to do it. For example:

• I'm sorry, I didn't intend to be offensive.
• I'm sorry, I didn't realize this would offend.
• I'm sorry, my wording was clumsy.
• I'm sorry, I probably didn't word that right.

I'm sure I'm coming across as condescending right now. I'm sorry you can't understand fundamental human interaction.

I got nine new decks of cards today. These ones are mixed in with my general photo-essay but I also gave them their own category because I plan to expand it with other kitschy Maomoribilia.

Here's a representative sample:

Ok, Imgur has (almost, but not quite) stopped sucking ass for now, so the photo-essay has been completed (minus a single image that fucking Imgur won't let me annotate for any reason).

There's a lot of verbiage and a lot of photos, so I've decided to take out the two photos (as yet unseen) that summarize the trip for me:

While I wait for Imgur to stop sucking ass (could be a LONG wait!), I thought I'd post the photo most representative of my corporate retreat experience that has thus far actually made it up:

I have a new maxim to go alongside "never get involved in a land war in Asia": never get involved in a drinking contest with a Chinese leader.

I mean I won but holy shit is this costing me. I'm too old for this.

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.

While waiting for Apu to share his tips, here are mine:

1. DO NOT USE BOILING/JUST-BOILED WATER. This, while absolutely necessary for blacks and oolongs, murders greens dead. You will get a massive dump of tannic acid from the brew that will ruin any attempt to tease out the actual nice flavours. For most commercial grade greens you want 85°C tops, and maybe even as low as 75°C if it's a decent commercial grade. For some of the more delicate greens you would go as low as even 65°C.
2. WASH YOUR TEA. Remember that "tannic acid" bit? Yeah, that stuff is nasty and tea is full of it. The oxidized teas (blacks and oolongs) have less of it, but it's there. Greens are abundant in it. Most people who don't like tea are actually reacting to the astringent bitterness of the tannic acid. Even tea drinkers who don't like green tea are reacting, most likely, to the tannic acid. So wash that shit away. The thing is that most of the agents that make tea taste good are oils and are not water-soluble. The stuff that is unpleasantly astringent is, however, water-soluble. A quick rinse of the tea (half-fill your cup, slosh it around for a few seconds, and pour it away) does wonders. You'll need to use more tea if you adopt this technique (like double), but don't worry. You can re-brew even a crappy tea like Red Rose or Lipton's at least once. (Finer oolongs and pu'ers can be re-brewed a half-dozen times or more with an ever-evolving, but not lost, flavour!) Use twice as much tea and just brew it twice. "Washing" your tea like this improves any tea, but it is essential to enjoying any green that has any flavour worth mentioning.
3. LET IT COOL. The ideal brewing temperature ranges from about 75-85°C for greens and hovering just below 100°C for blacks, oolongs, and most pu'ers. (The younger "raw" pu'ers should be treated like freaky greens and brewed on the high end of the green range.) The ideal drinking temperature is about 60°C. At that temperature you get the best blend of flavours from the tea (without scalding your tongue) and aromas from the oils in the tea. Drink it too hot and you're going to scald your tongue, swallow too quickly, and generally lose the opportunity to savour the aromas. Drink it too cold and the aromas fade away. The bingo point seems to be in the spread around 60°C.

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.

And Gany hits on the first of the many alterations to "General Tso's Chicken" to make it palatable to the locals…

When I first read that Oberlin fiasco months ago I started laughing like mad at the Chinese person who was complaining about the culturally appropriated General Tso's Chicken complaining how it was boiled, not fried like at home.

He's a fucking poser. A liar. A total and absolute fraud. He's either never actually set foot in China or he's lying about the food he ate while in China.

How do I know this? Because General Tso's Chicken is not a fucking thing here! It doesn't exist except as an American import. (And to be fair it's a pretty popular import--once adjusted to local tastes. Don't ask about the adjustments…) It is a dish born in the USA and bred in the USA. The real-life General Tso (properly Zuo Zongtang--more evidence of the dumb shit being a poser), contrary to the idiot stories surrounding this dish, never ate it. (It would be difficult for him to do so seeing as he died about 90 years before the dish was first created.)

The Japs whining about the purity of sushi are full of shit too. I've been in Japan (albeit ever so briefly) and you can get sushi that's easily as bad as what Oberlin was serving. I mean for fuck's sake there's sushi in vending machines! So much for the "intense respect" the dish is given in "authentic Japanese culture". (Someone apparently forgot to circulate the memo among the authentic Japanese…)

And bánh mì? Really? "Vietnamese" people are talking about bánh mì as if it were a dish? It. Fucking. Isn't. Bánh mì means "bread" for fuck's sake! It applies to any bread made with wheat. Any one. And it's the bread. Not the sandwiches (note the plural!) made with it (although through synecdoche the sandwiches are often called just bánh mì…in ENGLISH).

Which bánh mì did the "Vietnamese" chick mean when thinking about "comfort food from home"? Bánh mì kẹp kem? (That's an ice cream sandwich.) Bánh mì chay? (Vegetable sandwich.) Bánh mì thịt, maybe? (Meat sandwich.) Or any number of a thousand other variants? There simply is no single dish called bánh mì. What she described as an "insulting" version of bánh mì would probably be wolfed down in actual Vietnam without comment … unless the food was shit, of course. (And given that this is university cafeteria food that likely cost them about two bucks, it probably was shit. But not because it was "appropriated".)

The Oberlin students undermined any hope of ever being taken seriously on any subject with this little idiot stunt of theirs. The modern left is going to have to learn that not everything is political, not everything is problematic on oppression grounds (I'd be FAR more concerned about listeria outbreaks in cafeteria food than the hysteria that broke out there!), and that sometimes you can complain about things in and of themselves (this food is shit!) rather than making up lies so you can use the nuclear option.

It would be nice if games other than Shang introduced this then.

Something I've always wanted for player plots is an "overlay" system of some sort; a way of making a locale change according to events playing out.

For example, my crime family uses a dance studio as a money laundering facility. The description is … well, it's a dance studio. Normal dance studio shit. The wall of mirrors. The wooden bar. The padded flooring. Depending on time of day the students, the teachers, etc.

But …

Today the Ruprecht gang has decided to take on my funding and attacks the dance studio with flame throwers. This would tend to, you know, modify the site's @desc. But of course it can't. Because players don't have the ability to modify the grid. (WITH GOOD REASON I might add!)

What I'd really like, though, is some way to supply modified descs for rooms. Perhaps a way even of storing them locally and swapping them in and out like various clothing code some MUSHes have. +rdesc/change holy-shit-its-on-fire or something like that. This would give player plots some actual presence on the grid. It would still permit the use of rooms for other purposes (playing out time-bending scenes; background events, etc.) while making it such that player plots can have actual impact on the setting. Visible impact. People can go to their favourite corner bar and find that it's been trashed and vandalized. Or go to their classroom at the university only to find the chalk outline on the floor with the bloodstain over by where the head of the figure is. That kind of stuff.

Of course there's room for abuse with this kind of stuff, so you'd probably want to make it such that you need a permission attribute on the charbit to use it. Perhaps if people register a PRP they can temporarily get the permission bit. Perhaps you just give it to everybody but take it away from players who abuse it. Perhaps you give it to everybody after they've established themselves as decent players.

But this, to me, would be the dream feature for player-run plotting.

@Thenomain said in RL things I love:

@WTFE

I cannot imagine ruffle-shuffling those.

Resurrecting for this.

I found out how to do it. It's remarkably easy and actually quite elegant.

For all these stick cards, you hold them at the base with a slight incline so that the top card in each stack is a little bit forward and the bottom card is a little bit back. You then put these stacks together so the inclined surfaces meet and push together until the flex upward a bit. Then you slowly pull back and they riffle-shuffle BY THEMSELVES.

It looks and feels bloody magical!

@Auspice said in RL things I love:

I feel like I should photograph my cards... But they're almost all standard playing cards of various designs/styles.

Go for it! It's the designs and styles I like.

See it's shit like that making me just not fucking bother with Yelp (or any other "crowd-sourced" shit of any kind).

I know, I know. I'm getting tedious with this, but a new deck of cards has come in. This is a "Six Tigers" deck (in plastic that doesn't seem to be PVC), which is a game from one of the many, many, many minorities in China: the Hakka.

This will be added to my photo-essay when Imgur stops being a broken piece of shit.

(Edited: Imgur hasn't stopped being a broken piece of shit, but I found a workaround. It's in the photo-essay now.)