任是无情也动人

So as a matter of curiosity I was googling for slash references in Chinese history, and I stumbled on this link.

乾隆x和珅
...
Remembers 《宰相刘罗锅》
...
*is ded*

More articles...
中国古代同性恋排行 - Lots of examples from Han; a bit from Song, Ming, Qing. Surprisingly little from Tang, despite the fact that it was a really sexually liberal dynasty...
历史上哪个朝代盛行男风
古代中国为什么要盛行“男风” - Article in last comment.
古代“男风” - Seems to mostly concentrate on pre-Tang

http://www.mitbbs.com/article_t/SanFrancisco/32644365.html

Yes we all know that Journey to the West is a political commentary. So no big surprises on the numbers here. It's still some interesting info. And gotta admire the JttW geeks who took the time to compile it all.

Because my internet is still not liking GW at the moment, I spent some time reading the endless articles at cracked.com - that place is as addictive as tvtropes can be. Anyways, some gems that I wanted to share:

9 Words That Don't Mean What You Think

8 Awesome Cases of Internet Vigilantism

7 Stupid People Who Sued the Scientific Method

6 Insane Discoveries That Science Can't Explain

5 Most Baffling Sex Scenes in History of Fanfiction

9 Awesome Places to Have Sex (and the Horrific Consequences) - wonder how many bad fics have run afoul of these? :P

Written by an Associated Press journalist. Covers mainly the day to day stuff in Beijing rather than Olympics oriented. Looks like it's being updated daily. I found it hilarious.

linky

Note that the most recent entries are added at the top. So it may seem disjointed if you try reading it top to bottom instead of bottom to top.

I love the bit about getting his haircut from some overpass volunteer guard. "...I asked him, mainly through gestures, to do me." *snicker*

And the bit about Chinese men liking to roll up their shirts in the heat. (My dad does that at home sometimes too... -_-)

EDIT: HAHAHA! This one is hilarious too. Poor hockey teams and their mismatched undies. BWAHAHA.

It's no surprise that the western news services will find any excuse to nitpick anything with the Beijing Olympics.

And then you gotta wonder. "If that was faked, then what is this? Hallucination? Conspiracy?" *rolleyes*

According to yahoo's news entry, NBC withholding live Olympic events from west coast viewers - it's not enough that NBC is only broadcasting SOME events "live", as well as liberally cutting time out of said broadcasts to fit in commercials, those events will only be "live" for the East Coast. *stabs* I especially love the 3000+ replies echoing disgust at NBC's broken promises, incompetence, and general stupidity.

Here's some other news entries from Silicon Valley Insider - NBC Olympics: We Don't Care If You Hate Us, You're Watching USA-China Basketball On Tape Delay, NBC Lawyers In Panic Mode, Scrambling To Stamp Out Internet Olympics Feeds, Olympic Committee Outraged About USA Fans Watching Live Online, Sends Takedown Notices.

On a more helpful front, here's two more articles from SVI - How To Watch The Beijing Olympics LIVE On The Web -- Even If NBC Doesn't Want You To, YouTube At The Olympics: Exclusive Video You Can't Watch

Right, because China is so evil for enforcing censorship on their interwebs, so much that Washington called in google, yahoo, and Microsoft and yelled at them for helping the "commies" and told them to go write up a set of internet anti-censorship standards. So explain to me why NBC is responsible for causing IP filters to block people from outside China from watching the Olympics (international event, no less) on webcast? Because censorship in the name of politics is evil and censorship in the name of greed is A-OK, amirite?

*breathes*

On slightly happier topic, add http://www.yourglobaltv.com/china/ to the list of possible (remaining) webcast sources.

Idealizing Fantasy Bodies is an interesting article on the most popular/successful western style MMO and how it reflects western aethetics and gamer psychology.

I would love to see a similar study done for eastern games/aesthetics, and then compare the differences.

Or, to be more precise, a western viewpoint to an Asian type MMO. It would be interesting to read the original Chinese and see how much of the tone matches up, I think.

I actually found some of the comments more interesting (and less biased :p)... Eg. "An MMO such as ZT Online is no different than countless other MMO's like World of Warcraft or EVE Online. They all seek to exploit superficial aspects of Human Nature."

Interesting article on virtual transactions based online gaming - actually, interview transcription. It's dated July 07, so fairly recent in terms of the technology.

Speakers are:
John Blakely of Sony, who as far as I can tell, owns the only ingame selling/buying service that didn't go defunk for a popular MMO (see Station Exchange for EQ2, though I hear they're closing that in favor of a third party deal...)
Mark Jacobs (VP EA, Studio GM EA Mythic) - no idea who he is
Raph Koster (President Areae) - no idea who he is
Erik Bethke (CEO GoPets)
Matt Firor (moderator)

I have to admit though I that I find it hard to follow who's saying what and has what opinion. But I do get the impression there's several conflicting opinions in there. @_@

Background: ANet had a promotion for a GW Bonus Mission Pack - if you spent more than $30 in their online store between early July and the end of Oct, then you would get a set of bonus mission stuff with some unique rewards come Nov. The promotion was slapped in huge letters on the login page of the game with links to the info so I don't see how anyone could have missed the info on how to qualify, etc. Now that the BMP has come out and the people who got it are waxing poetic/gloating over the pretty rewards from the bonus missions, the forums have started to overflow with vitriole/flamewars from the people who didn't get the BMP for some reason or other. After reading some of the same old arguments over and over, I thought I'd vent my response here...

( caution: rant )

Finally, on a lighter note, here's a compilation snagged from a forum on the reward equipment from the bonus missions (the BMP should be available on both accounts, I think). They're all max level, blank inscriptions, auto-customized to user. I like the skins for the Tengu weapon line. The Tengu staff reminds me of Tripitaka's 三藏 (was that what it's called?). The Undead spear reminds me of a 方天画戟. And the Tengu scythe & hammer looks vaguely CLAMP-ish. ^^

Hilarious article this time. Don't I wish I had one of these to do my MUD'ing for me. ^_^

And yeah, I think that the bot will probably appear a lot more human/intelligent than some actual "human players" in MMO games.

Actually a speech transcript by Michael Crichton, titled "Aliens Cause Global Warming".

Interesting in a, "I can't tell if you're totally serious" kind of way.

In the same vein as the summary/spoilers cashew linked to for HP book 7 (I haven't worked up the motivation to actually go to the store and read the actual book), I found another author who did similiar treatments for several other HP books. These are much longer, chapter-by-chapter analyses, but still somewhat amusing to read. :)

Listed in order of being read/written by the author

Half Blood Prince main page

Prisoner of Azkaban
Chapter 0&1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

Sorcerer's Stone
Chapter 0&1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

Deathly Hallows
Chapter 0&1 2 3 4 5 ...tbc

http://ww3.telerama.com/~joseph/cooper/cooper.html

I've never heard of the work he's bashing, but I was kind of interested in the various rules "governing literary art in domain of romantic fiction" Twain lists. A lot of them are common sense. I don't agree with a few (not sure how #3 does in the vampire/undead/supernatural genre for instance). And it'd be interesting to see how many of my fics actually meet all the rules and which fics didn't meet which rules...

The one linked is titled "Play to Win". The site has some very insightful articles regarding the theory of game design and the psychology of gamers.

Yoinked from various online sources. *waves cheerleader flag for 戬哥哥!*

link ( full text )

link ( full text )

歪批西游 is a series of... well, not JttW fanfiction, but articles/opinion pieces on various characters and parts of the story. There's some humor/satire in it. I dunno how knowledgable is the author, and I don't completely agree with some of the sentiments in the articles, but I thought it was fun to read. ^_^

The first page isn't intersting, but there are some things I wanted to respond to starting from page 2.

The xover of major muggle and wizard events/wars - OMG, don't even try to put those together. Especially not by someone with only a layman's (or less) understanding of history and politics. I can buy something like that out of, say, Harry Turtledove or Eric Flint, who actually do comprehensive research on the moments in history they open their mouths about. But JKR? Stick to imaginary wand-waving. Please.

Muggle to Wizard population ratio - Well, at least JKR honestly admits that she's hopeless at math. How else do you come up with 40 kids in one grade level (Harry's) and then blurts out 600 for the student population of Hogwarts... yeah. But ~3000 wizards in Britain? With only a tiny portion of even those (see page 3) working for Voldemort. And yet they can be a global threat to the world? And with the pitiful magicks that the Potterverse has shown? Excuse me for being skeptical, to say the least.

The anti-shipping stuff - Okay, this time it's the interviewers being an idiot, and JKR is at least smart enough to be politic to avoid breaking her food bowl. But it brings to mind the fact that these people are utter idiots for not realizing that for any story, once it's published and read, becomes the interpretation of the reader, whatever the reader believes. The writer has no right to the readership's (or a reader's) beliefs on how things should be in the story.

Draco - I'm not touching this one with a 10-foot pole. I'm sure cashew will have something to say about it though. :p

The prophecy - I think this is probably the only worthwhile information given in the interview (it's on page 3). Basically, the prophecy regarding Harry and Voldemort was more of a MacBeth/Oedipus kind of self-perpetuating prophecy than a Tolkein or standard sci-fi/fantasy "it *must* happen this way and the timeline is set" kind of prophecy. That bodes well for fanfics, if nothing else. :p

The rationale for Slytherin House - Regardless there were some actually decent sentiments in Rowling's reply, the sheer condescension of the reply and the tone of the interviewer just... argh! Irritates me, to say the least.

Snape - I know there's oodles of ambiguous clues in the books pointing that Snape's allegiance is still with the side of light. But from a lot of Rowling's responses (as well as her personal dislike of the person she based the character on), it seems that one of the twists in the next book might be that Snape is actually evil. While at this point, I'm not sure I'd care that much about the good side winning, I do think that would be such a cheapening/slaughtering of his character after all this time. It'd be pointless. Meh.

Err... not quite a fic plug, but I guess you can call this an article plug?

A Case of Mistaken Identity

A very nicely researched defense of the character of one Elvenking Thranduil Oropherion of Greenwood the Great, later called Mirkwood. I like how she uses canon excerpts from The Hobbit and other Tolkien sources to show that Thranduil isn't the villain that most of fanon (the ignorant portion) sees him as. Quite the opposite, in fact.