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 still have no idea. “I critically succeed.” How? Why? With what?
There’s a reason why rule books are larger than half a page of A4. I genuinely have no clue how this works even with an example. Because there’s no explanation.
Your example needs to be “explain like I’m five”-grade. YOU know how this works. WE don’t.
I’m going to have to see an example of play that highlights the various subsystems here. I can’t make heads or tails of how to use this as-is.
In Toronto I ran into Styx at the airport.
I mean it literally. I bounced off Tommy Shaw and kind of reeled into James Young. (Totally my fault.)
They were actually really nice, checking if I was OK and once it clicked who I was talking to, putting up with my squeeing fangurl behaviour. Both of us were waiting for our respective flights so I got to talk with them a good half-hour before my flight started boarding.
Completely different words.
Breaking down the words:
This sounds like gibberish because it is. Chinese characters aren’t quite words, but are more like “roots” in English (like “bio” meaning “life”). As such they have broad and shifting meanings. The big two are the first word and the third. The first word literally means “throw” or “cast” (as in fishing line), but has other shades of meaning that imply “giving”. The third word literally means “report” in most uses, but can also mean “repay” or “reciprocate”. Factor into this that word forms and declensions just aren’t a thing in Chinese, and this particular expression stems from the Book of Songs which is written in the very, very, very terse language of Classical Chinese and …
… well translation is shifty and difficult.
Another way to translate this (with implied meanings in [brackets]) could be: “toss [someone a] peach [and he will] reciprocate [with a] plum”.
Or, you know, give a peach in return for a plum. (And my brain screwed up above which I will correct: I flipped plum and peach for some reason.)
As for the other part of your question, the characters for the online purchasing platform are: 淘宝. Breaking that down:
That first one is MOSTLY used to talk about sifting (such that 淘金 means “sift gold” or more idiomatically “pan for gold”). So the literal translation of that name is “sift treasure” or, more idiomatically, “treasure hunt”.
Insert the “the more you know” meme right here. 😆
Oh, God. Freeze Peach has reached the UK.
A vaguely similar expression exists in Chinese: 投桃报李 (tóu táo bào lǐ or “give a peach in return for a plum”). It suggests that reciprocity is key to gift-giving; that giving is as much part of the joy as is receiving.
When I had lots of money I preferred giving, partially because it made me feel good, but partially because often gifts I received were just not very well thought-out. (“I noticed you have a lot of RPGs, so I got you this new D&D module.” Never mind that the one RPG I don’t have is D&D in any flavour… That sort of thing.)
When I have less money (like now) … I still prefer giving, but only marginally.
Jade is quite a bit harder than even a hardcover book. ;)
It’s not all that posh, though. That example there costs the equivalent of about $35.
I agree with you. I use pillows of that shape almost exclusively these days.
You consider that a difficult pillow?
Try these on for size. The first turns your WiFi into 5G. The second into 6G, and the final one turns it into an ansible.
Yes, this last one is, in fact, a solid piece of jade. Why do you ask?
And here you come SO FUCKING CLOSE … and still fumble the ball. Tsk. Tsk.
Aside from him having always been an asshole (that story he tells of being bullied to the point of hospitalization neatly overlooks that he incited that attack…), I genuinely believe that Musk was “red-pilled” to the lunatic extent he is today because of his daughter’s transition and subsequent permanent rejection of him and everything he stands for. Kaptain Ketamine Kidd, the father of the year who refers to his living child as “killed by the woke mind virus”, went hard alt-right after she did the very public name change rejection.
(Hint: Check your assumptions. And while you’re at it check the thread history.)
If you think thousand dollar games are a necessity for modern publishing, I’m sorry there’s absolutely no common ground your or i have. Buh-bye.
After many years of working marketing for high tech firms, with an ever-increasing salary until it hit mid six-figures, I had a complete meltdown and dropped that work entirely, with no employment prospects and no idea of what to do for money, living off my savings for a year.
This enabled me to finally take the plunge and move half a world away (teaching English at first) to reconnect with my roots. I’ve been here now for almost 24 years and haven’t been happier. I even returned to marketing (well, market consultation) in 2016 and managed to somehow not have a second meltdown.
The smell of fresh tea when the package is opened.
“Stinky tofu” when passing the street carts selling it.
Freshly-made lard-cooked french fries.
A “strong-scented” baijiu.
A good Indian restaurant, that moment you walk inside and breath.
The point is these are games MADE FOR RICH PEOPLE. You know, like I said at the beginning of your blank incomprehension:
If you’re “appealing to a larger market” by making the game so expensive that only a few can afford it, are you really getting a larger market? Or are you just deciding you want to cater to rich folk?
$150 for an all cardboard game. Now let’s talk Star Wars: Imperial assault:
Fortunately all of the skirmish maps (at $25 each) are out of print so we’ve saved ourselves a further $325.
So the complete game, with all published parts currently available, is over a thousand bucks, which is utterly ludicrous for a mass market game that won’t even be remembered in a couple of decades (and whose components will have long rotted away before a century is out.
How ludicrous am I talking? For the price of this game that won’t survive a century as any kind of cultural icon (and whose components likely won’t last more than 30 years) I can buy a bespoke Xiangqi (Chinese Chess) set made of knotty red sandalwood with ornate, handmade mother-of-pearl inlay.
But this isn’t the entry price to play the game. If I just want to see if the game is even something I’m interested in, I can get a perfectly functional set for a little bit over fifty cents:
And even this el-cheapo set will outlast, probably, the thousand dollar Star Wars game aside from the thin board (which you can replicate easily with a piece of scrap wood, a pencil, and a ruler). And I also know the actual game will have legs considering the first known set of components was found in the archaeological record at 900 years ago or so, while mentions of it in literature go back almost 2500 years.
So here we have a game accessible to literally anybody ranging from the budget-conscious to the æsthetic fetishist, and that has proved popular across wildly different social classes for well over a thousand years. THIS is the kind of thing I wish the game industry would return to instead of ludicrous stuff like Star Wars: Imperial Assault, or Kingdom Death: Monsters, or Cthulhu Wars, or even the humble old Ogre. (In defence of Ogre, though, I have to say that at least it once had a cheap edition, and may still have.)
TL;DR summary: Stop making games for just rich folk if you want, you know, to expand the hobby, especially now that Trump’s tariffs are killing everything.
This has two answers.
First, which film scared me the most when I watched it: To my shame it’s Gamera. (I was a young child.)
Second, which film I consider the scariest now: Probably John Carpenter’s The Thing.