hailthefish posted:

Voted 4.

ladron posted:

dammit I missed the luck oh well what can I do?

cnut posted:

You are very unlucky, you must consult a TCM practitioner immediately! They have pills for that!

ladron posted:

dammit I missed the luck oh well what can I do?

ladron posted:

I hope I get some dead animal to rub on my junx for POWER LUCK

nerdz posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-flWUK3XtY

nerdz posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-flWUK3XtY

JaucheCharly posted:

That's a staggering level of aggression from an animal that's half comatose most of it's time.

nong posted:

Just ya'll wait till page 888.

The Great Autismo! posted:

I posted on page 888 in the China LAN thread, made me feel so good

Well I posted on like every page of the China LAN thread

ladron posted:

it doesn't even bite him or maul him or anything good, it just rolls around with him (insert gay/bear joke here)

Haier posted:

That thread is weird. It's the same 3-4 guys, 2-3 of them seem to live together (????). It's got nothing on this thread, with the same 5-6 guys, and zero of them seem to live together.

Gargamel Gibson posted:

Great, I missed the lucky Heil Hitler page. And now I'm posting on page 89, which must be super unlucky because of Tiananmen.

quote:

China on Tuesday rejected a plan by U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump to back out of a global climate change pact, saying a wise political leader should make policy in line with global trends, a rare comment on a foreign election.

...

"If they resist this trend, I don't think they'll win the support of their people, and their country's economic and social progress will also be affected," Xie Zhenhua said.

"I believe a wise political leader should take policy stances that conform with global trends," China's veteran climate chief said.

Trump has threatened to reject the Paris Agreement, a global accord negotiated by nearly 200 governments to battle climate change that takes effect on Friday.

Chinese officials are often hesitant to weigh in on foreign elections, although they will defend Chinese policies when attacked in candidates' policy platforms.

Xie's comments come as China plans to launch a national carbon trading scheme in 2017.

The scheme is on track and pilot programs have already traded 120 million carbon allowances with total transactions amounting to 3.2 billion yuan ($472.29 million), he added.

"It will take time for the market to be fully operational, but once it's operational, it'll be the largest carbon trading market in the world," said Xie.

...

Phlegmish posted:

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-37820663

lmao imagine just sitting at home and there's chinese tourists making GBS threads in your front garden

ladron posted:

Accretionist posted:

Right click, copy video source.


Then just paste the address (which will have a file extension). On this site, it'll automatically embed it as an animated doohickey.

Fauxtool posted:

nothing happened in 89, it was an uneventful year. Baidu search results are empty, stop talking about 89

Haier posted:

That thread is weird. It's the same 3-4 guys, 2-3 of them seem to live together (????). It's got nothing on this thread, with the same 5-6 guys, and zero of them seem to live together.

quote:

"China's state broadcaster has touched a raw nerve among its viewers by casting an actress and glamour model seen as "anti-China" in a documentary about the Long March."
One user, "Du Jianguo", with more than 180,000 Weibo followers, called it "unbelievable" that CCTV had cast Bai, and said the pictures, far from being a "promotion for the Long March", were "nothing less than an insult".
Another user, "Gonghe Xinxi", accused her of "flaunting herself" in the photos rather than being genuinely interested in the historical event.
Some users were blunter, telling her to simply "get out of China".

Haier posted:

It's a big-nosed guy in a green? An American? A Jew?

big time bisexual posted:

it's a north korean youth camp so i imagine the guy is supposed to be a g.i. being ripped to shreds

Haier posted:

I watched Dredd recently. LOL @ this comicbook cyberpunk dystopian fantasy Mega-City One that looks cleaner, friendlier, and less smoggy than any actual and true Chinese mega city we have right now. poo poo holes like Beijing and Shanghai should have been used as inspiration.

Blistex posted:

A link from the "Why are there Chinese tourists in my yard?" article.

China Long March film: US glamour model's role draws ire

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-37821547



I guess that Bai Ling was not a good choice for the documentary. . . funny, since she has the build of someone who was on a long march with little food.

Haier posted:

It's a big-nosed guy in a green? An American? A Jew?

Darkman Fanpage posted:

Bai Ling is legitmately insane, though from what I've read a lot of that might stem from the sexual abuse she suffered when she was a PLA theater troupe member.

quote:

"LOS ANGELES (AP) — Actress Bai Ling said she is confronting a dark chapter from her past: sexual abuse she suffered as a teenager at the hands of Chinese army officers.

Bai, 44, who was a soldier in a People's Liberation Army performance troupe from age 14 to 17, told The Associated Press in a recent interview that she was "opening a wound that was very secret to myself, that even my parents don't know."

Therapy she received during a U.S. reality TV series helped her understand what she endured in the 1980s and the psychological marks it left on her, Bai said.

She was pressed to have sex with her superiors, with one encounter leading to pregnancy and an abortion under an assumed name, Bai said, adding that other women serving with her in Tibet were also forced into sex and regularly plied with alcohol.

Bai stressed that she blames individual officers and not the Chinese government for events that have haunted her life and work."

Blistex posted:

North Korean propaganda really exaggerates some European features to make them look scarier. US soldiers are usually, tall, gaunt, have really dark sunken eyes, big noses, and mouths. They try and make them look as alien as possible compared to the Korean seen in propaganda posters that all look like chubby 4 year olds.

"https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/11/chinese-computers/504851/ posted:

Chinese Characters Are Futuristic and the Alphabet Is Old News
The QWERTY keyboard was once the envy of the world, but not anymore.
SARAH ZHANG

On a bright fall morning at Stanford, Tom Mullaney is telling me what’s wrong with QWERTY keyboards. Mullaney is not a technologist, nor is he one of those Dvorak keyboard enthusiasts. He’s a historian of modern China and we’re perusing his exhibit of Chinese typewriters and keyboards, the curation of which has led Mullaney to the conclusion that China is rising ahead technologically while the West falls behind, clinging to its QWERTY keyboard.

Now this was and still is an unusual view because Chinese—with its 75,000 individual characters rather than an alphabet—had historically been the language considered incompatible with modern technology. How do you send a telegram or use a typewriter with all those characters? How do you even communicate with the modern world? If you’re a Cambridge-educated classicist enamored with the Greeks, you might just conclude Chinese script is “archaic.” Long live the alphabet.

But, Mullaney argues, the invention of the computer could turn China’s enormous catalog of characters into an advantage.

Mullaney is the author of two forthcoming books on the Chinese typewriter and computer, and we discussed what he’s learned while researching them. His argument is pretty fascinating to unpack because, at its heart, it is about more than China. It is about our relationship to computers, not just as physical objects but as conduits to intangible software. Typing English on a QWERTY computer keyboard, he says, “is about the most basic rudimentary way you can use a keyboard.” You press the “a” key and “a” appears on your screen. “It doesn't make use of a computer’s processing power and memory and the cheapening thereof.” Type “a” on a QWERTY keyboard hooked up to a Chinese computer, on the other hand, and the computer is off anticipating the next characters. Typing in Chinese requires mediation from a layer of software that is obvious to the user.

In other words, to type a Chinese character is essentially to punch in a set of instructions—a code if you will, to retrieve a specific character. Mullaney calls Chinese typists “code conscious.” Dozens of ways to input Chinese now exist, but the Western world mostly remains stuck typing letter-by-letter on a computer keyboard, without taking full advantage of software-augmented shortcuts. Because, he asks, “How do you convince a person who's been told for a century and a half that their alphabet is the greatest thing since sliced bread?”

It’s China’s awkward history with the telegraph and the typewriter, argues Mullaney, that primed Chinese speakers to take full advantage of software when it came along—to the point where it’s now faster to input Chinese than English.

[...]

The Chinese way of inputting text—the software-mediated way—will win out, says Mullaney. Actually, it’s already won out. Our mobile phones now have predictive text and autocomplete. It took the constraint of mobile to get Westerners to realize the limits of the simple what-you-type-is-what-you-get keyboard. But even then, you could only get Americans to go so far.

The introduction of T9—the predictive texting system on early cell phones—illuminates that cultural gap. When the Seattle-based Tegic company first developed T9, it created a new letter arrangement on cellphones. The standard had always been 2 = abc, 3 = def, 4 = ghi, and so on. As T9 users will surely remember, several different words often match the same set of numbers, so you might hit “4663” and have to key through “good,” “home”, and “hoof”, before finally arriving at “hone.” But Tegic had initially developed a new way of assigned numbers to letter—not QWERTY or alphabet-based—optimized to prevent overlaps.

It didn’t fly. “One of our early stage investors said, ‘You are not going to change the letter arrangement on mobile keyboards,’” recalls Tegic cofounder William Valenti. “We had to accept a less efficient input system because we had to be in the constraints of the existing letter arrangement.”

In China, it was easier to convince users to try something new—because there was no established default to fight. Chinese T9 is a stroke-based system, and different keys represented different strokes. With predictive text anticipating the next character, a typist on T9 averaged just 1.4 strokes per character, says Valenti. For reference, common Chinese characters are made up of nine strokes on average. This is a huge leap in efficiency. (Valenti, by the way, was a Chinese translator during the Vietnam war, listening in on four-digit telegraph codes and turning them in Chinese characters, so he’s familiar with the awkward, pre-software phase of Chinese input systems, too.)

“In China,” says Christina Xu, an independent design researcher and ethnographer, “the proliferation of mobile over the last ten years has meant an explosion of new users learning to type for the first time on a mobile device—they don't have any attachment or experience in QWERTY, so getting them to adopt new input methods is way easier.” The input method families include stroke-based ones like T9, pronunciation-based typing on QWERTY keyboard, or writing on a touchscreen—with numerous variations therein.

“If you took 50 people and say ‘type the exact same thing,’” says Mullaney,” if you actually looked at what they did on their keyboards, you could get 50 different ways of achieving the same outcome.” Experimentation is mainstream. Yet alternative, faster typing methods in English, like ShapeWriter or Swype that let you swipe through the letters of the word in one motion, have struggled to catch on outside of early adopters. Plain old QWERTY is good enough. Who wants to completely relearn how to interact with their phone just to type a little bit faster?

Mullaney’s rhetoric can sometimes be jarring, like when he says, “There is an incredibly self-satisfied culture in alphabetic world.” Personally, I’d identify less as an active alphabet worshipper and more as a passive lazy person who does not want to learn a coded, if more efficient, way of typing. But he’s challenging the primacy of the QWERTY keyboard—challenging the idea of Western technology protocols default.

That language is also jarring because the West as default has gone unchallenged for so long. The telegraph was developed with the alphabet in mind. So was the typewriter. And the computer. And internet protocols. And yes, Chinese speakers spent a century conforming their language to those technologies until computing power transcended them, resulting in a relationship with technology richer and more complicated than in the alphabetic world.