Neodosa

I’ve lived in China now for almost a month, and when walking about you will see many political slogans plastered everywhere including stuff about socialist construction and great rejuvenation. The thing I see the most however is the ‘socialist core values’ which list the following:

富强、民主、文明、和谐 prosperity, democracy, civility, harmony 自由、平等、公正、法治 freedom, equality, justice, the rule of law 爱国、敬业、诚信、友善 patriotism, dedication, integrity, friendship

I always found these a bit weird and I don’t really understand their purpose and I also don’t quite see why they should be plastered everywhere. I have some ideas but I would like to hear all of your guys’ opinions.

Btw, I don’t need a vpn to access lemmygrad funnily enough

Yes, I have to start with the obligatory: the first time I watched the movie I was disappointed, but upon rewatch I realized how deep the rabbit hole goes, and after tens of hours of studying this movie, I can finally see what a masterpiece it is.

After having spent tens of hours with this movie, I've finally sorted out most of the major questions and have a pretty good idea of what's actually going on. The movie is so hard to wrap your head around though because you basically have to think in four dimensions, and you have to build a mental model for a crystallized universe and keep track of all the actors at all times, and their motivations. Our brains are not made to comprehend stuff like this, so it's understandable that people were frustrated with the movie. However, I think I reduced my odds of developing Alzheimers by 95% during the process of studying this thing and the process itself was very gratifying. Still though, I'm not done building more intuition for the movie so I will definitely be spending even more time grasping the details. I highly recommend committing yourself to the process 👍

It's without a doubt my favorite movie of all time.

come at me brah (or just throw me some questions idk)

I've probably tripped around 20 times throughout my life. I did it mostly because I bought into the idea that psychedelics would improve my life and habits in some way. I don't believe that anymore, and I don't think psychs really changed my life at all except it gave me lots of cool memories. I kind of feel some level of nostalgia for that reality-bending feeling of being on psychs, even though the last time I took it was only a couple months ago. It's just so different from everyday experience.

I started my third playthrough of Cyberpunk a couple days ago, playing it with the Chinese dub, and I have to say that it has worked really well as an immersion resource! You can enable the Chinese audio dub by right clicking on the game on steam, then click 'properties', then under 'general' there will be a 'language' option where you can choose a number of languages.

I don't know about the Witcher 3 since I haven't played it, but Cyberpunk is really dialogue heavy, so there is seriously like hundreds of hours of dialogue to go through (and then there's also the shards to read). The game makes heavy use of poetic language as well as highly informal language, which has really put strain on my current abilities, so I'm having to jot down new words all the time.

While the marketing and release of this game was scummy to say the least, there is actually quite a good game here if you just try to take in the story, the scenery, as well as delve into the sidequests (the sidequests are honestly a lot more interesting than the main story). One of my favorite moments I've had while playing any video game has to be when I accidentally fell into the 'hidden' park that's hidden 'underneath' the city center, subsequently going for a calm walk, being amazed by the scenery, and then stumbling upon a buddhist monk who gives a short guided meditation.

Even though I have 140 hours on this game, there are still so many sidequest lines to go through. Since I'm using the game as an immersion resource now, I'm definitely going to be replaying the game.

Many have the impression that China is a very car-polluted country with heavy traffic and wide streets occupying much of the cities. I think this impression mostly comes from the fact that much of the imagery one sees while hearing news about China is that of multi-lane streets going through cities. What you don't see in these shots however, are the enormous blocks that lie in between these streets. You can look at the map of any Chinese city, and you will see that the blocks are usually around 500x500 meters. In Soviet fashion, these blocks are big enough to have all of the services one would need during the day, as well as green space. At the same time, there are usually larger parks in the vicinity as well hosting various community activities. All of this is reflected in the fact that China has a very low motorization rate.

If you're wondering about why these wide streets exist in the first place, one has to understand that these cities are big, and these wide streets are kind of a rare sight when looking at the cities as a whole (although they are very much necessary for car traffic). I would much rather like to see wider streets at a lower cadence than frequently having to wait at shorter crossings. Here in Stockholm, crossings feel like such a headache since they're so frequent.

These green space developments are most obvious when you go just outside the city center. Here, you will usually find very high density tall housing as seen in the picture above. Having these tall buildings then leaves good amount of space for greenery.

This is a picture of Shijiazhuang, which is far from a tier-one city, and it is also far from being known as a city with greenery (it is stereotypically a polluted city). After looking around a bit in the city center, this was pretty much the most concrete-looking part I could find. You can still see, however, that each block has some amount of green space, and besides, there are big parks just outside of this frame. Shijiazhuang is the city which I will be living in during the coming year due to my upcoming exchange year.

As for public transport, I think we all have an idea of what the situation looks like.

I can't wait to build hyper-walkable cities and make parking space non-existent.

However, it feels like all games I've ever been hyped about have turned out disappointing, like Cyberpunk and KSP2. However, the CS2 devs seem to be showing off their game without much restriction and they aren't exactly making out of this world promises which makes me feel that this time it might turn out diffirently...