I'm slightly surprised at the weekend that just ended. Between browsing EDMW, watching the stream on Vidya2, doing work, blogging and eating, I found that I didn't have much time to play games at all! All I did was complete the final round of the newbie campaign and go halfway through the second round of the second campaign of Caesar IV (completed the first round earlier last week).
What a busy weekend I had!
Speaking of Vidya2, one guy was streaming himself playing the WiNi. The WiNi is like a Wii in terms of appearance but has a number of built-in games.
Apparently he bought it at a very low price, though no actual number was ever mentioned. Just because it had Sudoku and a Bomberman-like game (a rip offone of the early ones, with colour), he said it was worth the money. I think it's easy to judge from that comment.
He's from the Netherlands, so it's interesting how far Chinese bootleg versions of modern gaming consoles can spread.
That WiNi had several key differences from the Wii.
- There's a capital N in the name.
- The graphics are from the SNES era.
- Most of the games are similar to those in old 2G colour-screen phones.
- The controller response timing was terrible. It had a split-second lag as far as I could tell when he was playing the music games.
- Almost every game used the literal name for the activity as the game title, eg the boxing game was entitled "Boxing", although there was no jazz music in the music game with the word "Jazz" in its name.
- Here's the most important feature of all - there is no disc drive.
Just read about gaman on Wikipedia.
Showing gaman is seen as a sign of maturity and strength. Keeping your private affairs, problems and complaints silent demonstrates strength and politeness as others have seemingly larger problems as well.
So instead of whining about my problems to people I know, I keep this blog which I passively try to keep apart from my real identity. I said "passively" because I don't actually do anything; all I really do is not mention this blog IRL and mention my identity here.
This means I do whine, except in secret (from the point of view of people who know me IRL). From this, I can deduce that I'm only pretending to show gaman because I pretend to keep my "private affairs, problems and complaints silent".
But it's true that I'm not the only one with problems. In fact, sometimes I feel that a lot of my friends have bigger problems that I do
One issue I'm going to have, I thought of only yesterday.
The work that we do is unique to us and the buyer. Other stores do things quite differently, in a much harder way (for us). This means that when she retires, there is no guarantee her successor will allow us to keep doing what we do now. In fact, there is too much competition in Singapore for me to safely assume that it is likely she will continue what the current buyer is doing.
And judging from her age, I'm guessing I'll be in my 30s by the time she retires, or earlier if she gets promoted to elsewhere. If she stays there till retirement, it's not going to make it any easier for me to find a job if I close the business down then.
All these leave me only 3 options in the long term:
1) Learn fashion design, which is risky since, again, I have no background in this at all.
2) Diversify into other products in the future, which is very risky IMO.
3) Rely on my degree.
Despite saying that options 1 and 2 are risky, I feel that I'm inclined to go with both. Anything to escape the dreaded 8-to-5 (with OT everyday).
Ok, I've just most definitely screwed up my second of three assignment of this Contrastive Analysis of Chinese/English module. Managed to somehow get an "average" score for the first (according to the lecturer, anything over 70 from her was a distinction), but this time, I'm very sure it was not done well. This subject is hard. The entire assignment had only one question - analyse and compare the original sentence and the translated sentence, except each question required the analysis to come from different angles and the final question was to use any angle.
I'm just not familiar with this enough and I was not familiar with this subject prior to taking this module unlike all the stuff in other modules.
Damn. I need to do better for the last then.
Tuesday
Oh no, I'm close to getting sick. This coffee tastes strangely bitter, only at the back of my tongue. Either I'm too heaty or the condensed milk has expired.
Let me taste this again...
It's just the back of the tongue.
Fortunately I have plenty of herbal teas in the fridge, including 2 (300ml?) bottles of the "24-herbs" herbal tea, aka 廿四味 (nian4 si4 wei4). AFAIK that's one of the strongest cooling herbal tea in traditional chinese medicine and since I was young, that was what I was always given when lesser herbal teas like chrysanthemum tea didn't work.
I'm not saying I actually believe in the heat and coolness system in traditional chinese medicine but after at least 3000 years of refining and trials-and-error, it has to be doing something correctly. I mean, if your entire race has been throwing darts from 500m away for over 3 millenia, some of them have to end up with a perfect bullseye, right?
Furthermore, legend has it that in ancient times, physicians test unknown herbs on their disciples to record the effects, and if they run out of those, they test it on themselves. Let's not let those lives go to waste.
Anyway it's strange that 廿 is pronounced nian4 because in Cantonese, it's pronounced "ya" (can't translate the tone). Almost all words I know in Cantonese are pronounced pretty similarly to their Mandarin pronunciation, yet "ya" and "nian" are seriously worlds apart.
Speaking of chrysanthemum tea, I've only recently learnt that I'm not supposed to boil it. All I need to do is to bring the pot of water to boil and dump the dried flowers into the boiling water before turning off the heat. Sugar's added last after the flowers have been sieved out, and to taste.
I boiled a pot of it for a minute or so, and it tasted much stronger than what I'm used to. Perfectly drinkable, just not as pleasant. The taste was too heavy, not sure that's the correct way to describe it.
The colours in my job are weird due to the crappy quality of dyes (I think) in the Chinese factories. Certain shades of red, if I wanted to order my goods in those, have to be called another shade of red in order to have the right shade.
If one is unlucky, they might get end up delivering diarrhoea brown instead of burgundy. I admit I'm exaggerating here, but not by much.
In any case, I wouldn't be able send it back and ask for refund if that happens. The Chinese Chinese, they're great at pretending to be stupid. Together with their irresistibly low prices, that's how they make money.
After all, that's what they call 扮猪吃老虎 (translation: pretend to be a pig to eat the tiger).
I don't get it. Why would the stats of my blog be of interest to anyone? Yet if it interests no one, why is it that every time I mention it, my page views rise a little?
Yesterday (Monday) I looked at the total page views for this blog on the day before, and I thought maybe the slight increase was due to it being a weekend. Then I looked at it again today and it had remained constant yesterday, a Monday. Moreover, the last rant had a particularly low view count since it was published, so the rise probably wasn't caused by it.
This could mean it has been at that rate since the last time I checked.
(My first attempt at using Memegenerator)
No, I'm not going to give any specific numbers this time.
Disclaimer: Given that I only check the numbers once a week at most, I may have been completely wrong. Who knows? Better yet, who cares?
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