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oohhboy
Jun 8, 2013

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS

Stuff posted:

China lost to Syria 0-1 in World Cup qualifiers.

How does that even happen?!

Fojar38 posted:

actually china is bad and uncool

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Ailumao
Nov 4, 2004

Koramei posted:

Some of their partnerships have worked out okay but I have yet to see indigenous Chinese animation that is anything but garbage, do you have any good examples?

It's old and maybe the technical animation isn't the best part, but late 80's/early 90's syndicated children's cartoon Hei Mao Jing Zhang/Black Cat Detective is kind of amazing and the kind of thing that China would never, ever try to make again.

Short clip, I dunno if you'd call it :nws: but it's kinda surprisingly bloody for a children's cartoon

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKwQ7QjmL5g

Every episode has crazy poo poo like this. There's one entire one where after a super violent fight between preying mantises and locusts (several scenes of characters on fire flailing around in pain while burning to death occur), Black Cat Detective has to solve a murder of a male mantis. In the end they find out his wife ate him when they got married because that's what mantises do and nature or something????

This show was targeted at like 8 year olds.

I originally came across it when I asked my ex-girlfriend about Chinese animation and she remembered liking this one as a kid. We watched that episode and a couple others and even she was like "wow how did we watch this as kids???"

Grand Fromage
Jan 30, 2006

L-l-look at you bar-bartender, a-a pa-pathetic creature of meat and bone, un-underestimating my l-l-liver's ability to metab-meTABolize t-toxins. How can you p-poison a perfect, immortal alcohOLIC?


I want TGA to stay so he can post pics of what the office looks like in six months and again in a year.

China has its own laws of physics where entropy occurs faster than anywhere else.

Grand Fromage
Jan 30, 2006

L-l-look at you bar-bartender, a-a pa-pathetic creature of meat and bone, un-underestimating my l-l-liver's ability to metab-meTABolize t-toxins. How can you p-poison a perfect, immortal alcohOLIC?


At one of the schools I work at one of the other teachers asked me when I thought it was built, a couple weeks after I'd started. I looked around at the state of the buildings and classrooms and guessed the late 70s, early 80s. It was actually 2010.

Fauxtool
Oct 21, 2008

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS

Fojar38 posted:

lol

This summer there was like a torrent of articles about "China's plan to become a global football superpower" too

Didnt their efforts to become a superpower consist of paying enormous signing bonuses to foreign players?

Grand Fromage posted:

At one of the schools I work at one of the other teachers asked me when I thought it was built, a couple weeks after I'd started. I looked around at the state of the buildings and classrooms and guessed the late 70s, early 80s. It was actually 2010.

basically china is one big olympic village after the olympics end

Tupperwarez
Apr 4, 2004

"phphphphphphpht"? this is what you're going with?

you sure?

Grand Fromage posted:

China has its own laws of physics where entropy occurs faster than anywhere else.
It's not really a law of physics, more of a personal code: "Someone else is responsible for this, so gently caress taking good care of it. In fact actively destroy it, why not?"

Grand Fromage
Jan 30, 2006

L-l-look at you bar-bartender, a-a pa-pathetic creature of meat and bone, un-underestimating my l-l-liver's ability to metab-meTABolize t-toxins. How can you p-poison a perfect, immortal alcohOLIC?


Fauxtool posted:

Didnt their efforts to become a superpower consist of paying enormous signing bonuses to foreign players?

It's being pushed everywhere. The school I work at was trying to do some sort of English soccer class bullshit that we all refused to participate in until it went away, and the principal has been trying to force all students to play soccer constantly in order to create the bright Chinese soccer future.

What is "English soccer"? I have no idea and neither did they, but I didn't come here to teach English so nope.

Fojar38
Sep 2, 2011


Sorry I meant to say I hope that the police use maximum force and kill or maim a bunch of innocent people, thus paving a way for a proletarian uprising and socialist utopia


also here's a stupid take
---------------------------->
i just remembered that china got owned at this years olympics by the uk and loled

Grand Fromage
Jan 30, 2006

L-l-look at you bar-bartender, a-a pa-pathetic creature of meat and bone, un-underestimating my l-l-liver's ability to metab-meTABolize t-toxins. How can you p-poison a perfect, immortal alcohOLIC?


I'm sure sending kids to boarding school (which seems to be the majority of schools here? Or at least a huge percentage compared to the US) where you are in the classroom from 7:30 AM to 10:00 PM and also there half of Sunday and a lot are stuck in weekend classes is going to produce tons of great athletes. If you just let kids go play sports instead of memorizing textbooks verbatim they'll never be Olympic level.

LentThem
Aug 31, 2004

90% Retractible

The Great Autismo! posted:

it's time for TGA's "Hey, We're Moving Offices in China! lol!"

part one
part two

the foreigners had to work yesterday, so we all showed up outside the new office. the building isn't really open yet, so we kinda had to go through a roped off construction zone to get to the front door. a police officer was very nice and showed me the way. i know people from my company have been going there because while all the foreigners had a holiday, the marketing staff has been uploading pictures of themselves wearing masks and painting the walls in the new building.

quickly off topic: i really hate the divide of foreigners and locals in my office. they give us all more holiday time, we work 5 days a week for 40 hours, while every chinese person has to work 6 days a week for 54 hours. it just seems like such an easy way to develop bad feelings. in our new office there are two rooms, one is for "foreign teachers" and one is for "chinese teachers", and i said "can't we just put all the teachers together" and the girl said "of course not". uh, ok.

anyway, we took the elevator to our floor, i guess last time the elevator wouldn't go to our new floor. this time it did. one of our employees was encouraged by that. when we arrived, this is what it looked like.








which isn't nearly as bad as it looked in the first picture about 10 days ago. the girl from chicago that works with us was really impressed with how much they've done, and i guess i would be too, but i've seen entire infrastructures for subways go up and running in like under two years, like entire subway lines with 20 plus stops. go near washington dc and they will be doing construction on 495 for the next decade and nothing will ever seem to change. china changes overnight. that's cool and good, IMO.

i did walk around the office, we have only bought half the floor, the other half of the floor looks like this.



so i ended up talking with the girl from HR for a bit, and she said everyone had to work. but since our computers aren't set up yet, and we have no internet, we can't really work right now. so i gave the foreign staff the day to go "work from home", meaning if they have stuff to do, please go get it done. this really isn't allowed in china, like there is this distinct idea at work where if you are at work, you are therefore working. so if you are not at work, you can't be paid for work. as in i've talked to people numerous times who are at work, sleeping or playing video games, and they are like "well today i had to work" and i'll say "what did you do at work" and they'll respond with "nothing, i had a rest". so the entire chinese staff stayed there and chatted and all the foreigners kinda bobbed in and out. i went to go work out.

i could have kissed the HR girl i was so happy, on my way out she came to me and said "i need help translating all of this" and it was all of the english they were going to put all over the office. "admissions", "marketing", "finance", and our previous chinglish all over the wall. she said "we don't want to make any english mistakes this time". i could have cried. i was like "omg its happening...things...are...changing." i told my boss when i signed for another six months that my wife, son and i would be out the door in june, but this office is amazing and they are like...changing the way they are doing things? a little? maybe just a tiny bit? it's so encouraging. i started working for this company in madison, wisconsin, we had a one room office in capitol square that we could barely afford, then i moved to china and we had the most disgusting office ever. then we moved again, now we are here. i was all emotionally ready to leave china but this is so good, it's like "....dammit." it would have been easy if it looked horrible, but this new building is boss. guess we'll see how work keeps going in the future.

God drat at this rate I'm going to lose my over/under bet on that place being serviceable. Even so, I imagine the formaldehyde levels in there are amazing right now. You should totally get one of those cheap testing kits from Taobao for fun. We bought one when our team moved into a new office and people were randomly getting headaches and dizzy spells, and the results were great, like "illegal even by china standards" great.

It turned out you were supposed to let those new cubicle materials 'gas out' on the roof or something for a while first rather than shove them into an enclosed space where the windows don't open. Told the office manager and China Face took over, causing her to tell us "If you don't like it you can leave. Illegal levels, are you threatening me? I have a better lawyer than you." A day or two later she quietly had the cubicles (only from the people who complained) replaced with the older, rotten ones (now no formaldehyde, just mold and poo poo). So the headaches went away in our half of the office, but the people on the other side were still hosed. Super glad I don't work there anymore.

And yeah construction here is weird in that there will be no progress for 3-6 months, and then suddenly 70% of the work is finished in a few days. There was an Ajisen Ramen place that was gutted and dead for about 2 months, and then I walked by it a week later and it was a a finished, stocked clothing store.

Facebook Aunt
Oct 4, 2008

wiggle wiggle




LentThem posted:

God drat at this rate I'm going to lose my over/under bet on that place being serviceable. Even so, I imagine the formaldehyde levels in there are amazing right now. You should totally get one of those cheap testing kits from Taobao for fun. We bought one when our team moved into a new office and people were randomly getting headaches and dizzy spells, and the results were great, like "illegal even by china standards" great.

It turned out you were supposed to let those new cubicle materials 'gas out' on the roof or something for a while first rather than shove them into an enclosed space where the windows don't open. Told the office manager and China Face took over, causing her to tell us "If you don't like it you can leave. Illegal levels, are you threatening me? I have a better lawyer than you." A day or two later she quietly had the cubicles (only from the people who complained) replaced with the older, rotten ones (now no formaldehyde, just mold and poo poo). So the headaches went away in our half of the office, but the people on the other side were still hosed. Super glad I don't work there anymore.

And yeah construction here is weird in that there will be no progress for 3-6 months, and then suddenly 70% of the work is finished in a few days. There was an Ajisen Ramen place that was gutted and dead for about 2 months, and then I walked by it a week later and it was a a finished, stocked clothing store.

It's like all of china is run by undergrads putting the finishing touches on their term papers 10 minutes before they are due.

fish and chips and dip
Feb 17, 2010

Grand Fromage posted:

At one of the schools I work at one of the other teachers asked me when I thought it was built, a couple weeks after I'd started. I looked around at the state of the buildings and classrooms and guessed the late 70s, early 80s. It was actually 2010.

Yes, this was soemthing that shocked me as well when i first came to China. When looking for an apartment I ended up living in a nice area in Shanghai in a building from 2009, yet in many ways it was in worse condition than most of the mid-60's Communist blocks I've lived in across eastern Europe.

Second, when my mom came to visit me, at which point I was living in a different place, I asked her to guess when the building was built, she guessed early 50's, yet it was from 1992.

Same with roads and highways in some places in China the highways are deteriorating faster than highways made out of literal cardboard in eastern Europe.

fish and chips and dip
Feb 17, 2010

Stuff posted:

China lost to Syria 0-1 in World Cup qualifiers.

How long until some high ranking fotball officials suddenly get ensnared in a "curruption" probe?

Scionix
Oct 17, 2009

hoog emm xDDD
how do you not go fuckign insane living in china and never seeing the honest to god blue sky

Jimmy Little Balls
Aug 23, 2009
Last year my university opened a new teaching building and when I first went inside I thought I'd gone into the old one by mistake somehow since the layout was the same but was in worse condition, holes in the wall, footprints 8ft up the wall, black mould and that sort of stuff. Also the drainage pipes were inside the building, but there'd be a little bit of pipe sticking out of the ceiling then a 15ft gap to the little bit of pipe sticking out of the floor down 6 floors of the building.

Grand Fromage
Jan 30, 2006

L-l-look at you bar-bartender, a-a pa-pathetic creature of meat and bone, un-underestimating my l-l-liver's ability to metab-meTABolize t-toxins. How can you p-poison a perfect, immortal alcohOLIC?


Scionix posted:

how do you not go fuckign insane living in china and never seeing the honest to god blue sky

Because that's overstated. I was praying for clouds halfway through this summer so it'd cool down. Sunny every day and hot as gently caress.

MisterOblivious
Mar 17, 2010

by sebmojo

Grand Fromage posted:

I'm using some of these pics in class next week. I showed Mayan skull deformation and now I can give them an idea what it would look like as a living person.

I was expecting a genetic disorder, not head binding


"Fiveheads and Sixheads are pretty sexy, can you do a Twelvehead?"
I got you, fam

Vegetable
Oct 22, 2010

how does that poo poo affect the brain, is there just a lot more bone, more empty space, less brain or what

I would blow Dane Cook
Dec 26, 2008

Vegetable posted:

how does that poo poo affect the brain, is there just a lot more bone, more empty space, less brain or what

Inability to process why questions.

Telsa Cola
Aug 19, 2011

No... this is all wrong... this whole operation has just gone completely sidewaysface

Vegetable posted:

how does that poo poo affect the brain, is there just a lot more bone, more empty space, less brain or what

Volume doesn't really change, just the outside shape. Its pretty much the same concept of giving a helmet to a child to make their head rounder, just taken into a different direction. Its done progressively too so its not a super drastic shift.

Nucken Futz
Oct 30, 2010

by Reene
So I'm reading through PYF Fun Historical Fact thread when I come upon this gem,


fish and chips and dip posted:

.... ... .... there is a fun Portugese word "Desenrascanco" meaning to slap together a solution to a problem at the last minute, i.e. MacGyver the poo poo out of everything which I like to think is how they built their empire.

Desenrascanco = Chabuduo

Now I'n wondering how many cultures have one word for " Let's fix the "insurmountable problem" with a skeezy ghetto half-assed solution"

Facebook Aunt
Oct 4, 2008

wiggle wiggle




Vegetable posted:

how does that poo poo affect the brain, is there just a lot more bone, more empty space, less brain or what

Probably doesn't affect the brain at all. They wrap the newborn's soft head so the skull hardens in an elongated shape instead of just whatever. The brain grows to occupy the shape it has.




We do basically the same thing with helmet therapy for kids with certain skull deformities. http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/neur...ng-therapy.html

MisterOblivious
Mar 17, 2010

by sebmojo
:derptiel:

The Great Autismo!
Mar 3, 2007

by Fluffdaddy

Scionix posted:

how do you not go fuckign insane living in china and never seeing the honest to god blue sky

it's been raining the past few days so that's why it kinda looks gloomy lately. tho in those pictures i posted you could see the blue sky a fair amount where we were...just kinda crappy in the southern part of tianjin, looked like mordor.

we got our office computers and internet up and running. i guess this is the real thing. i'm back at work less than 10 days after we were supposed to move and couldn't. i set the over under at 15.5 and everyone bet the over. you all lose, give me money.

Jack2142
Jul 17, 2014

Shitposting in Seattle

Grand Fromage posted:

What is "English soccer"

Ages of false superiority combined with crippling insecurity and failure on the world stage.

Honestly that sounds like it fits China pretty well.

LentThem
Aug 31, 2004

90% Retractible

The Great Autismo! posted:

it's been raining the past few days so that's why it kinda looks gloomy lately. tho in those pictures i posted you could see the blue sky a fair amount where we were...just kinda crappy in the southern part of tianjin, looked like mordor.

we got our office computers and internet up and running. i guess this is the real thing. i'm back at work less than 10 days after we were supposed to move and couldn't. i set the over under at 15.5 and everyone bet the over. you all lose, give me money.

Thats amazing, 10 days including the middle of a 7-day national holiday.

There must have been some absolutely furious migrant workers leaving revenge-turds in the paneling.

Haier
Aug 10, 2007

by Lowtax

Scionix posted:

how do you not go fuckign insane living in china and never seeing the honest to god blue sky

I see it all the time in Shenzhen (at this time of the year). When the clouds or stoms blow in, like Grand Fromage said, it's a huge relief. I know other cities have the smog feature, but it's not the entire country all the time. I check the Air Quality Index religiously and it is true that on 100+ AQI days that visibility distance limited and the brown haze hangs over everything. This is a feature of living in many parts of Asia, though.

Here's a NSFW photo of an executioner during the Boxer Rebellion or something (probably got my facts wrong).
http://i.imgur.com/J374OpK.jpg

The Great Autismo!
Mar 3, 2007

by Fluffdaddy

Haier posted:

Here's a NSFW photo of an executioner during the Boxer Rebellion or something (probably got my facts wrong).
http://i.imgur.com/J374OpK.jpg

wtf

Haier
Aug 10, 2007

by Lowtax

Jack2142 posted:

Ages of false superiority combined with crippling insecurity and failure on the world stage.

Honestly that sounds like it fits China pretty well.

If you can't do it properly you do it anyway, because Face is much more important than inability to be a perfect human in an imperfect world.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhrerQh5fPQ

ladron
Sep 15, 2007

eso es lo que es

Haier posted:


Here's a NSFW photo of an executioner during the Boxer Rebellion or something (probably got my facts wrong).
http://i.imgur.com/J374OpK.jpg

honestly I would prefer the naked kind of nsfw photos

Fojar38
Sep 2, 2011


Sorry I meant to say I hope that the police use maximum force and kill or maim a bunch of innocent people, thus paving a way for a proletarian uprising and socialist utopia


also here's a stupid take
---------------------------->

Jack2142 posted:

Ages of false superiority combined with crippling insecurity and failure on the world stage.

Honestly that sounds like it fits China pretty well.

The UK was actually successful on the world stage for a while though while China's history on the world stage is a neverending conga line of hilarious self-ownage

Grand Fromage
Jan 30, 2006

L-l-look at you bar-bartender, a-a pa-pathetic creature of meat and bone, un-underestimating my l-l-liver's ability to metab-meTABolize t-toxins. How can you p-poison a perfect, immortal alcohOLIC?


Here in Sichuan there are a lot of cloudy days. It's nothing to do with pollution it's just cloudy and wet here.

There is also pollution. The thing is the dangerous PM 2.5 stuff is invisible so it can be a bright clear day and still 200 AQI. The appearance and the pollution level sometimes correlate but it's not guaranteed.

fish and chips and dip
Feb 17, 2010

Scionix posted:

how do you not go fuckign insane living in china and never seeing the honest to god blue sky

First of all, it really does affect my mental well-being (10 more months, 10 more months...), but to be fair, since about June the pollution has been reasonably low in Shanghai. I can't remember the last time there was this long stretch of blue skies and not having to wear my mask everywhere.

Fojar38
Sep 2, 2011


Sorry I meant to say I hope that the police use maximum force and kill or maim a bunch of innocent people, thus paving a way for a proletarian uprising and socialist utopia


also here's a stupid take
---------------------------->
It's because the economy is taking a massive poo poo, hth

specifically a massive poo poo on the sidewalk of the global economy, and the brics are about to step right in it. brazil is wearing sandals, oh no!

Grand Fromage
Jan 30, 2006

L-l-look at you bar-bartender, a-a pa-pathetic creature of meat and bone, un-underestimating my l-l-liver's ability to metab-meTABolize t-toxins. How can you p-poison a perfect, immortal alcohOLIC?


Brazil's already been wallowing in a pool of poo poo for years so it's developed an immunity.

Anyway pollution season is almost upon us, as the people begin burning the cheapest coal they can find at their homes for heat and the air fills with ash and radiation.

big time bisexual
Oct 16, 2002

Cool Party
Do you do anything to protect yourself against pm2.5 Grand Fromage? Portable air quality monitors? Air filters in the apartment?

The Great Autismo!
Mar 3, 2007

by Fluffdaddy
the pollution will get really bad in november, which not by coincidence is the next time i'm leaving, :getin:

Grand Fromage
Jan 30, 2006

L-l-look at you bar-bartender, a-a pa-pathetic creature of meat and bone, un-underestimating my l-l-liver's ability to metab-meTABolize t-toxins. How can you p-poison a perfect, immortal alcohOLIC?


big time bisexual posted:

Do you do anything to protect yourself against pm2.5 Grand Fromage? Portable air quality monitors? Air filters in the apartment?

My apartment is as sealed up as I can get it and I have a couple air filters that run 24/7. I have never gotten a monitor but there's a noticeable difference in smell/black crud in your nose between indoors and out, so it seems to be working fine. For outside I have one of these:



Which is good but more of a couldn't hurt thing, because at work it is impossible to convince Chinese people to close the windows or to get air filters for the building so you're breathing poo poo all day there.

E: Also I live in Chengdu. Pollution here is bad by the standards of like a real country but for China it isn't that severe. It's not one of those places that pegs the meter at 999 for months. The pollution is mostly during winter and like everyone else, I'll be out of the country for a month of that so that also helps.

Grand Fromage fucked around with this message at 08:44 on Oct 7, 2016

KomodoWagon
May 10, 2013

by R. Guyovich

Grand Fromage posted:

My apartment is as sealed up as I can get it and I have a couple air filters that run 24/7. I have never gotten a monitor but there's a noticeable difference in smell/black crud in your nose between indoors and out, so it seems to be working fine. For outside I have one of these:



Which is good but more of a couldn't hurt thing, because at work it is impossible to convince Chinese people to close the windows or to get air filters for the building so you're breathing poo poo all day there.

E: Also I live in Chengdu. Pollution here is bad by the standards of like a real country but for China it isn't that severe. It's not one of those places that pegs the meter at 999 for months. The pollution is mostly during winter and like everyone else, I'll be out of the country for a month of that so that also helps.

I would wear this thing constantly if I had to go to China for some reason, even as I slept

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The Great Autismo!
Mar 3, 2007

by Fluffdaddy

KomodoWagon posted:

I would wear this thing constantly if I had to go to China for some reason, even as I slept

it's really not that bad at all

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