Cake is Delicious

Today was a day of great adventure. Also a little sadtimes but mostly adventure. This morning I woke up to take Amy to the train station (She’s going back to Taiyuan for 4 days until she comes back for work). I snapped one goodbye picture of Amy (gallery at the end).

At the train station I intended to wait with Amy until she boarded the train but as we were in the lineup and as it got more and more crowded I started to feel trapped and really quickly recognized a situation I needed to get out of. I apologized to Amy and told her I need to leave, gave her a hug and texted her after. She knows about my anxiety problems and knows that it’s under control but that there are some situations I simply need to avoid. She understands and doesn’t hate me for it, which is a lot more than I can say for some people over the years..

I was scheduled to meet up with Angela B, one of my third year students, because she wanted to see me one more time before she goes home to her family for the winter break. As a quick sidenote, the students have January 9th until February 23rd with no classes. We met just before lunch and spent the day together, right up until just after dinner. At about 11AM we met at my campus and went for a walk. I wanted to buy a headset and we had trouble deciding on our first stop so we went to the computer store near my campus for mad headset purchasing. I found one for 55yuan that seems really nice. We talked the girl down to 50yuan and I went away with a nice headset.. which I just tested and it seems pretty functional.

The second stop was a shopping mall where we just walked around and browsed. After that we went for lunch at Big Pizza. Now in China there’s this interesting cultural trick to going out to eat with people. The person who does the inviting is typically the one who pays. My first month in China I didn’t figure out exactly how this worked but basically if you say “Do you want to have lunch?” that doesn’t count. You have to say “I invite you to join me for lunch”, and as a foreigner I seem to have to really emphasize I invite you or else they still try and pay. And sometimes the person will be sneaky and run off to pay anyway. Well I wanted Big Pizza which is 43yuan per person and Angela is a student. Students typically live on 2yuan meals, spending 4-6 for an expensive lunch or dinner with friends. I wasn’t going to let this girl pay for my pizza, especially when I was the one who suggested the place. So after we decided on the place I said, “Okay, Big Pizza, I invite you.” She argued with me but I ended up winning. Turns out Angela B got a scholarship for doing really well this term - very cool. Still, for most students their parents are spending all their money just to send their child to school. I can’t let her spend 86yuan on me the day before she goes back to her parents. They’d probably have been happy that she spent the entire day with her foreign teacher for some valuble 1 on 1 time but I can’t use that as an excuse to let her pay. It’s not a dating thing, it’s a she could really use that money to help her family and I can’t in good conscience let her spend it on me. Anyway, Big Pizza was delicious.

After Big Pizza we came back towards my apartment to drop off my headset. Angela B (I add the B because her old English name was Betty but she changed it and I already had an Angela student from another class) wanted to get some photos done. The Chinese words basically mean pictures but the direct translation is “Big Head Sticky” because they take pictures of your head and print them on adhesive paper. It’s very similar to those machines where you put in some money and it prints a strip of photos in various poses except this lets you add backdrops and excitement. I will try and scan the printed pictures sometime this week but I make no promises. I tried to take a picture of it with my camera but it didn’t work out very well.

Oh, before the pictures we played kicky feather thing. I’m getting really good at it now. Michael’s not half bad but Angela rarely plays. By the end of our 30 minutes of kicky thing we were all doing much better. Hayley’s husband even came out to kick with us as he walked home from the supermarket. He managed to kick his bag of vegetables, sending bits of cauliflower or cabbage or something in all directions. It was beautiful.

We chilled in my apartment for about an hour, I showed off my new TV and took some random pictures. Angela B has this sweater that looks like a cat, it’s great. So obviously I took pictures. I introduced her to Smallville and my new TV as well as peanut butter sandwiches. Michael came knockin’ on the door asking about dinner and so we decided popcorn chicken was our destination. We had some popcorn chicken and then Angela B got in a taxi and went back to her dorm. Oh, at one point we also got coffee with rum syrup from the nearby coffee shop. It was excellent.

Overall the day was a great success.

Wii:

I mentioned that I bought a Wii online, or at least mentioned that I was going to. It was ordered yesterday and should be arriving in the next three days - hopefully before Friday. The guy who sold it to me knocked off 100yuan due to a delay in shipping and also put two games in there at no extra cost. So it worked out pretty well. No idea what the games are but when they cost 5-10yuan each it doesn’t matter. The Wii is coming with one controller and once I’ve tested it and made sure it’s all functional I’ll be ordering another controller, a guitar controller (for Guitar Hero 3), and Component Cables.

Widescreen:

Why component cables? Well I’m glad you asked, my friend. I am glad you asked. You see, I went to an electronics store on January 2nd and discovered they were having a sort of Boxing Day sale but on new years instead. I found a beautiful 32″ LG LCD TV for a discounted price. The original price was 6000RMB, I paid 4000RMB. Not too bad, eh? I struggled with this purchase for a few reasons. The first was I did not want Amy to get angry with me. I asked Joy, Joel, and Michael “will Amy break up with me if I buy this TV?” they all seemed to think no, and Joy said “If Joel brought this TV home I would be very happy”. So that covered that one. The second question I asked myself was about my father. I owe him 6000 - 6500 RMB because he paid my sister the money I owed her from my laptop. I justified the Wii because he said there was no big rush, just that he wanted to get paid back. I didn’t really justify the TV other than deciding that once I get my pay at the end of February I’ll be paying him back in full. I didn’t want to pass up the price on this TV (sale was ending that day I think) and I really really wanted it. My laptop has HDMI out and can play high definition movies, the Wii does 480p, and if I ever get a PS3 (which is one of those maaaaaaybe things) I’d love to have a 720p capable TV. This one is capable of recieving a 1080p signal but it simply downgrades it to 720p (which is better than blue screening 1080p). 1080p was a difference of 4000-8000 RMB and since TV shows are still broadcast in 720p, the Wii is 480p, and BluRay is 720 OR 1080 I decided not to spring for the extra money since I’ll mostly be using it for TV shows and Wii. And 720p movies still look friggin amazing.

The story of the setup is good. So I unpack the box, and my heart sinks when I pull out a small bag of screws. I don’t have a screwdriver. I also don’t have any of my Chinese friends available. Damn! I’m screwed! I send a message to Michael, I have a mission: I must find a screwdriver. Also let’s get popcorn chicken (I think we actually had Da Pan Ji / Ji Kuar Mien). Anyway, we looked for a hardware store by walking around a little and were unsuccessful. Then we thought about going to the market but as that thought came my stomach did a little jump and reminded me that I needed to take a trip home for a few minutes. But as we headed back towards the school I had the fabulous idea of going to the big computer store because a place that sells all computer parts should have a place that sells screwdrivers. Right? Well, we went upstairs to the market-type place - a bunch of people have little sections of floor where they cram stuff in to sell. Every section is basically exactly the same with varying degrees of attractive girls or old ladies or men working in them. I went to one with a girl and pulled out my bag of screws. Michael and I then looked like idiots as we made hand motions like a screwdriver while holding the bag of screws. She actually had one but it was her personal one and she didn’t want to sell it, so we used a new phrase I learned from Amy “Ji shi shu ma?” which is spelled wrong but basically means “this is what?” or what is this. She gave us the name and then pointed us to another section who had screwdrivers in a display. We asked for a screwdriver by the word the girl told us - which I now forget, and he pulls one out. It fit my two screws so I asked how much (dough show chien?) and paid my 8 yuan. Came home, set it up, watched Supernatural in HD, and then got an erection.

Warhammer:

So I’ve been playing Warhammer for four months. Since the day before I left for China, actually. I’ve made new characters several times now, never really advancing beyond level 25. I’m having a hard time finding what I really enjoy. I’m a casual player, I play for maybe 1-2 hours a day, sometimes more if Dan happens to be playing that day. But usually I get up between 8-9 and I’m done by 10-11. Sometimes I’ll log in for some playing after lunch but most of the time I don’t. As a casual player it’s very difficult to log in and accomplish something. You need a lot more experience to level than you do in other games, and so a lot of times I’ll log in for an hour and then wonder what I just did. Getting maybe one bar/bubble of experience (about 10% of a level) and feel that I really didn’t accomplish very much. Sometimes you’ll get into a really good battle in oRvR (though that only started recently) but most of the time I find myself hopping into scenarios with random people and hoping for the best. I play a Witch Hunter (melee DPS) and playing solo is pretty terrible. I have a guild who I roll with when I can, but most of them are in Tier4 and I’m still stuck in T3. Once I get to T4 it should be much more fun but right now I’m wondering why I have to grind to T4 to enjoy the game. The journey should be as much fun as the destination.

World of Warcraft:

This leads me into my next point. I quit WoW “forever” partway through Season 3. At that point I was a super-casual, mostly only logging to do my 10 games per week. Well, during a bored day of Warhammer I decided to activate the free Wrath of the Lich King 10 day trial to see if I could enjoy 10 days of WoW. I think I got an hour in and realized why I quit the game. The first quest I got once I arrived in Northrend was to kill 15 spider things. The second quest was to collect items from the same part as spider things. Every game does these sorts of quests but in WoW it just felt tired. It was cool that my Shadow Priest’s Mind Flay could crit though. I liked that. What I really noticed though was how many features Warhammer has that stock WoW doesn’t have that I take for granted. Warhammer basically tells you where to go for each quest with handy map markers. Which is an addon you could get for WoW but in Warhammer it’s part of the default UI and it’s amazing to have. I don’t like doing WoW vs WAR comparisons - especially considering WAR’s UI was able to correct the mistakes made by WoW’s UI. But that one feature of Warhammer is just so helpful. Anyway, I played one day of my 10 day free trial and realized my WoW days are completely done. I had a good run in that game but I’m so done.

Writing:

My next two points are more creative in nature and are the only things that prevent me from flagging this entry as “pointless” (because let’s face it, up until now it’s been pointless). I have been planning to take the winter break as time to make progress on the book I’m trying to write. I’ve taken the last few days to finalize my plan for writing it and starting tomorrow night I’ll actually start working on the first chapter. I’m not going to put any details in here for a number of reasons, but most of all to keep it a surprise to my friends and family. So far the people I’ve talked to about it all loved the idea and thought it’d make a great story, so hopefully I can actually get it on paper (well, word processor) with all the hype I’ve given it.

RoD:

I am sad that all of my headers were W except for RoD but there it is. First of all a link (even though it’s on the side): http://www.realmsofdespair.com. So as the handful of people who read this may already know, I’m part of the administration team (called Immortals) on RoD. I’ve been trying to build an area for the game for about a year, but suffered periods of no inspiration, and then the first term in China was a nightmare. I’ve got a couple of projects which I’m finally about to get back into. But first my area. I’m actually teaming up with another guy for the area. We’re making a zone in which there are two houses seperated by a forest and a river. The story behind the area is to mimic Romeo and Juliet, with the two houses hating each other and fighting. The player will be able to choose if he wants to side with one family, side with the lovers, or just outright kill everyone. Each path will offer its own rewards and the hope is to make it a place you’d visit every couple of days as you keep leveling up. It’s a low level only zone, so once you hit max level (50) you can’t go back in. Players can get started at level 10 doing easy things like killing rabbits and deer to gather meat for the chefs and by the time they get into the 40s they’re finishing the questline of their choice. Most players will hop between many different areas while leveling and so the hope for our area is to be a hop players would go to every 5-10 levels once or twice just for that little boost and maybe some small reward while they build up to the top. A player could also choose to simply rampage through the whole thing at 45 but would miss out on the experience offered to lower level players who do it in order. It should be excellent.

Once I’m finished my side (the other guy and I are each doing one house) I plan to make another area - probably for the player killers in the game. Deadly play is down a bit now, and some new stuff to conquer might help create some activity. I’ve got another project for an automated capture the flag idea nearing completion but my area would be something seperate from that. Still not entirely sure what I’m going to put into it but there are a few pieces of equipment that are desperately needed and hopefully I’ll be able to fill some of the gaps. It’ll be my first attempt at building something for max level players which is considerably more difficult than building for low levels. Low level players are more or less locked at a maximum damage and hit points capacity. Max level players have limits on those as well but then there are many players above those limits due to rare/out of game equipment or glory (bonus stats from quests).

I also plan to make six months’ worth of quests so I can get back into running quests for the players.

I’ll spell the words wrong because I spell them by english phonetics not by proper pingyin, but anyway here is my dinner tonight. Not shown is the popcorn chicken I ate on the way to this place.

Delicious.

I’ve got some more videos for you of Michael and I making idiots of ourselves:

Stayin’ Alive - The only way to sing this song at Karaoke is in high pitched screaming voices - obviously.

Random dancing - I don’t even know how to describe this one:

Jess butchers Sk8er Boi:

Michael singing Britney:

Teaching Chinese people the Macarena:

Some of the videos turned out kind of dark. I didn’t realize this until I put them on Youtube because I have my video card set to crank up brightness of videos. But you can sort of make them out and Youtube is all about terrible quality anyway.

After watching these videos a few times I am sad to admit that Michael is much more of a showman than me. It was hard to keep up with all of his craziness.

Celine Dion - My Heart Will Go On

Backstreet Boys - As Long As You Love Me

So I ordered myself a Wii from the internet. Well, Carson ordered for me. 1700 RMB for the Wii, 150 RMB for shipping makes it 1850. With current exchange rates that makes it about $330 CDN. Not too bad, I guess. A lot of things aren’t cheaper in China. Today I’m going to go looking at televisions. I want an LCD tv for my apartment to watch movies on and play Wii on.

The only downside to all this is when I leave China they’ll stay behind. I suppose I could ship my stuff back to Canada with me or buy an extra suitcase but what if I don’t go to Canada next? What if I head off to some other country for a year or travel Europe? I don’t want to drag a Wii and an LCD TV with me. But I’ll be in Linfen for at least three years, and after that I’m still not sure. I might be in China longer, I might come back to Canada. Nevertheless, after 3 years a Wii and a TV will be somewhat outdated and I will have gotten enough use out of them that I can give them to a friend before I leave and move on with my one suitcase.

One other thing is I want to link Michael’s blog: http://odysseylounge.blogspot.com/

Michael is the new guy who is leaving in about 2 weeks to go to some other province. He lives the nomadic lifestyle, one or two suitcases and travels around. He’s been all over Europe and now he’s starting his Asia tour. It’s nice to get to know him because he’s spent several years doing what I’m only just starting to do now - well, hoping to start doing. I think his blog started shortly before coming to China, I dunno. I didn’t actually read his older entries

It’s 2:45PM and now that I’ve mostly recovered from New Years Eve I decided I should write a little something. The pictures are in the previous post to this one (or on Facebook) and the videos are still incoming. I have to play around in Movie Maker and maybe try to figure out how to use Adobe Premiere so it might take a day or two. But I promise soon enough you’ll get to see me singing My Heart Will Go On.

The plan was sort of last minute. It was supposed to be all five of us - Myself, Amy, Joel, Joy, and Michael.  Joy got sick and so Joel had to withdraw from the festivities which left just the three of us. Joel and Joy had gone to KFC for dinner while Michael, Amy and I went to Dico’s (like KFC but more Chinese). On our way there we saw a KTV (Karaoke) club and decided to go after dinner. I texted Joel and told him where we’d be if Joy felt better. We were going to only stay for an hour but we were having so much fun we ended up doing another hour there. It’s 68yuan per hour, which is a little over $10 CDN. Really not bad considering we got our own private room with couches and disco lights (though I still have problems with strobe lights). They had a surprising number of English songs - Chinese people had me believing they’d have a handful at best but there was a very healthy selection. Bee Gees, Elvis Presley, Abba, Backstreet Boys, etc etc. Some really good music (also some lousy music).

The pictures really speak for the entertainment value. We had an amazing time at KTV. The plan was to go play pool until the countdown but then we passed a bar that Michael and I had wanted to go into once but I was intimidated by our lack of Chinese escort. Last night we had Amy and so we decided to go in. Aside from one really REALLY drunk guy who got a bit obnoxious it was an awesome time. The drunk guy was removed and that ended, then we had some Chinese girls teach us a dance. Michael and I then gave China the gift of the Macarena which you will see a video of soon enough (I hate you Michael). In the meantime I believe there are pictures of that too. There would be considerably more pictures but the flash got turned off partway through and so they didn’t all turn out.

We stayed at the bar until countdown. We ordered about 5 beers for ourselves but a few people were bringing us drinks. Michael got two beers on the dance floor and when I went to take a picture of him drinking one someone handed me one. I didn’t want to get drunk and so I had to be really careful at that point I didn’t drink much more, but I managed to get out sober. On the walk home we picked up our fireworks which we’d stashed before we went into the bar and Michael was throwing them around. These are those extremely loud dynamite fireworks and at 12:30AM we were setting off car alarms and being general nuisances all while saying Happy New Year in Chinese to anyone we came across. It was awesome.

My short writeup doesn’t do the night justice, you really need to see the pictures to truly understand. I didn’t caption them because I’m still recovering but you can imagine what’s going on. I think there’s even a picture of me air guitaring. Well, Michael is the air guitar. I’m the air bass.

It’s the morning after New Years Eve. Do you seriously expect a writeup? Enjoy the 130 pictures

Oh, Pam. I know you love the peace sign so we made sure to do it EXTRA just for you <3

Also we took like 6 videos which will of course be posted to Facebook and Youtube soon enough.

Chris is another foreign guy who teaches at one of the other schools in town. We’d been trying to get together for a while but scheduling conflicts kept getting in the way, but yesterday we managed to get together to have a quick holiday celebration. I have some pictures.

Before I get started on writing I wanted to share something with my loyal reader: You have 116 posts, contained within 13 categories and 19 tags. You have 660 total comments, 159 approved, 501 spam and 0 awaiting moderation.

This is from the Admin panel of my blog software. After I bought my camera and started uploading tons of pictures I started getting hit with spambots - well, one in particular. Every day I’d have between 2-3 new spams from the same damn bot. I was able to block his garbage using a keyword filter but the guy running the bot doesn’t care and so my spam comments keeps going up. Right now it’s increasing by 20-30 every day I post pictures. It’s pretty awesome. Spam wouldn’t be such a horrible problem if Google would block blog links from contributing to a page’s Google rank. Ah well.

So today I went shopping for a Wii which then turned into shopping for a new bike. Carson knew of a store where they deal in products such as the Wii but they do not keep active stock as it is sort of a rare request in my small city and the machine is quite costly (about 2000 RMB). So Carson said we’d order it online and it would all work out, I’d get it in about the same time - assuming Carson actually comes over to help me order it sometime in the next day or two. I look forward to playing WIi Tennis with Joel, Joy, Amy, and Michael (until the jerk leaves).

After the Wii we checked out some bike stores. Joel’s been looking for a freestyle bike and we happened to be really close to a store. He wasn’t impressed with their selection so we went exploring to find the mythical bigger store that Michael and I happened upon the other day on a bike ride. We managed to find the store by some stroke of pure luck and they had lots of nice bikes but Joel wasn’t actually ready to buy a bike. Hopefully he gets one and then we can go on SUPERBIKERIDES with the girls. We had to go to dinner or else I would have looked at some of the bikes there. I want a mountain bike which can be used on the roads but can also be used off the roads. A street bike (with thin tires) won’t work for me and a rugged bike with crazy suspension won’t be efficient on the roads. There are mountain bikes that are somewhere in the middle but I also want to make sure I get something durable both for my weight and for going of MADD RAMPZ.

After dinner Amy saw a shoestore and wanted me to go in and ask about ordering some shoes. The guy thinks he can order shoes in my size and so he took Amy’s number and will call her on Monday. They will cost me about 600RMB but I kind of need a backup pair and that is about what I’d pay for shoes in Canada so I’m not too worried about it.

Anyway, I leave it at that for now. I’m tired and I want to play Chrono Trigger DS. Speaking of which: Fuck you Square Enix. Why didn’t you update the graphics for the best game ever made and yet you did updated graphics for Final Fantasy 3 which fucking sucked? I understand that the game is nearly 20 years old but really? REALLY? Throw some flowers on some shit and it’s still shit. Chrono Trigger deserved more than a couple of dungeons and a shittier version of Pokemon.