Blue hair is cool. Especially if you add subtle plum streaks.

I went full punkette in the very late '70s and early '80s, so shaved, spiked, and in whatever colours I could find (whether it was meant for hair or not).

Nice choice! She’s a remarkably talented woman.

I’d need two.

For men: Tony Leung. Good-looking. Sensitive. Insanely talented.

For women: I’m torn between Maggie Cheung or Faye Wong. I’m probably leaning in the direction of Faye, but it’s only a slight lean.

Fair.

I have quite a few friends who are former lovers.

The things that make good friends don’t always make for the best lovers. It’s almost like we have two different words there for a reason.

For OP, your problem isn’t friends/lovers. It’s that when you broke up you weren’t sufficiently firm on post-breakup boundaries.

Theramin? “One of these things is not like the others!”

I wish I could afford one of those. They look fascinating.

A lot of very good guitarists (Alex Lifeson leaps to mind) are almost entirely self-taught.

The left hand has all the buttons on a piano accordion, but also has cheats. The second line from the top is the tonic and the top line is the third from that tonic. The tones go up by fifths along the length.

The third gives you the major chord of the tonic, the fourth gives you the minor chord, the fifth gives you the dominant 7th, and the sixth (on the one I owned) gives you the diminished 7th. So you have automation for chord accompaniment and rarely have to play anything of significant complexity on the left.

Which leaves the bellows and half a piano on the right. 🤣

I have zero musical ability so I’m in awe of anyone that has any

Unless you literally have congenital amusia (a.k.a. tone deafness), there is no such thing as zero musical ability. About 1-2% of people are thought to have congenital amusia, so it’s not out of the question but … uh … can you distinguish songs when you hear them? If so, you likely don’t have it. (There is expressive amusia, but it’s the least prevalent of the types.)

So, barring amusia, anybody has musical ability. All you need is exposure, practice time, and the patience to learn. If you really want to learn, pick up a simple instrument (a wind instrument with a fipple mouthpiece like a recorder, tin whistle, or ocarina; a kalimba; a small, cheap keyboard) and just start. Keep it cheap because if you don’t enjoy it you don’t want to have spent a lot of money.

I started off with an accordion at age 4. (Yes, before I actually went to school!) I got good enough at it that by age 16 I got 4th place in a Baden-Württemberg state level championship.

But before that, at around the age of 8, I’d actually paused at the accordion (for complicated reasons stemming from how early I’d started and the workload that was expected of me at the music school) and started playing the organ instead, with home lessons. I got pretty good at it before a move to Germany (and subsequent re-uptake of the accordion) ended that around the age of 12.

While I was in Germany, parallel to continuing with my accordion, I joined my school band. There really wasn’t a place for accordion in that curriculum so I picked up the saxophone and got almost as good with it as I was with my accordion.

I then, in my final year of school, at age 17, I had to make an important choice for my future: basically did I want to study music and go pro, or did I want to study business and marketing? I chose the latter because I had this inkling that I would not do well as a pro musician.

That being said, I still played music. I still had my accordion (the saxophone was the school’s and I wasn’t going to spend the cash to buy one for myself: them things are EXPENSIVE yo!), and I had a knack for picking up other instruments. Even in school I’d already picked up the clarinet because it was similar enough to a saxophone I could get to the point of playing decently with little effort.

I did drop the accordion after about ten years, though, because it was just too big to constantly lug around as I bounced around from apartment to apartment and city to city. I donated it to an old man who was a pro player (retired) and bored in his old folk’s home.

Since then I’ve picked up the following woodwinds to the point that I can reliably play simple tunes at least:

• dizi (I have at least 5 in various keys)
• xiao (I have 4 in various keys and fingerings)
• guanzi (only one; fiendishly difficult to play!)
• bawu (one end blown, one side blown, one double-barrelled side blown)
• hulusi (one wood, one “single-belly” gourd)
• LittleSax (one 8-hole, one 10-hole)

(This may sound ridiculous, but really the fingerings are so similar that it’s trivial to learn a new one’s and instead you focus on the embouchure.)

I’ve also picked up a couple of woodwind-adjacent instruments:

• ocarina (one “serious” transverse one and a bunch of cheap novelty pendant ones, most of which I give as gifts to students)
• xun (another fiendishly difficult one; a clay 8-hole, a clay 10-hole, and three 10-hole bamboo ones in various keys)

Finally I’ve lately become quite enamoured of the kalimba and have five of those (17-key box, 17-key solid acrylic, 24-key, 34-key chromatic, and 42-key chromatic, the last three in solid wood). I initially got the first one while bored during the COVID-19 lockdowns and it was so much fun I got a few more.

Don’t. You likely personally know more than the greatest polymath of the third century CE in any nation. There was just less to know.

Polymath just means “knows a lot of subjects”. (It was easier to be a polymath back in ancient times.) Zhuge Liang was a philosopher, a general, a skilled warrior, a poet, an inventor, a …

I’d go back to about 222CE to the period of the Battle of Yiling. Not for the battle itself, but for the aftermath.

See, the novel Three Kingdoms mentions an incident where famed genius general Zhuge Liang ambushed an army chasing them down near Yufu, which is near present-day Zigui County, Hubei Province.

There are two versions of the story. In the first he uses a “Stone Sentinel Maze” to trap the pursuing army of Lu Xun of Wu while his own and Liu Bei’s troops escape. They wandered, lost, in this bizarre arrangement of natural stones until they were guided out by a local elder, but by then the people they were chasing were long gone.

The second version has him using an “Eight Trigram Formation” to confound and trap the Wei army commanded by Sima Yi, before magnanimously releasing it, demonstrating both that he could have destroyed said army, but chose not to.

These are fiction, I stress, but they’re fiction based on folklore, and folklore often has a basis in tenuous, grossly distorted fact. (For example the story of Hou Yi shooting the ten suns is very credibly a story based on a calendar reform that introduced China’s solilunar taking ten days off a month to bring the calendar in line with the novel creation of the 24 solar forms. The shooting of ten suns may have been a folkloric encoding of a calendar change.) So for the facts of this clear work of fiction:

1. The Battle of Yiling is documented very well, and is supported by physical evidence.
2. Zhuge Liang is a historical personage who was noted as being a polymath genius, including, but not limited to, military strategy.
3. The Battle of Yiling did not go well for Liu Bei (it effectively destroyed his army) and he was, in fact, chased by Lu Xun mercilessly after the fact.
4. The territory around Zigui has some of the most confounding terrain imaginable with weird rock formations and treacherous nearness to riverbanks.

So it is not out of the question that Zhuge Liang in desperation misled or trapped a chasing army in the weird terrain around Zigui giving the remnants of Liu Bei’s army (and Liu Bei himself) the opportunity to finally escape. Then, over time, as history faded and mythology grew around the giants of the Three Kingdoms era, a desperate, last-ditch effort to escape turns into a brilliant military plan in which Zhuge Liang toyed with a rival general in a catch-and-release program.

I want to watch and see what really happened. I want to see the truth behind the millennia of myth.

Only after it got really, really, really, really bright. 😄

I’m close to Renewal. The red gem is about to start flashing. So the fiery ritual of Carousel is going to claim me soon enough. I’m at peace with that.

I’ve also arranged that I have nobody whose existence I’m responsible for that has to contend with the rather depressing future ahead of humanity. (Read: I have not procreated.) So I’m at peace with that as well. If humanity wants to obliterate itself in an orgy of stupidity and greed, that’s not my concern.

…

Unless.

…

They choose to do that before my Carousel. So that’s my main fear: that humanity will be in such a rush to fuck itself up that my palm won’t be blinking before WWIII or whatever starts. That I’ll have to witness what I’ve sadly come to accept as inevitable: the extinction of human civilization and the nigh-extinction of the human species.

I know, right? It’s amazing what kind of perfidy is done out in the net!

looks left

…

looks right

…

张殿李 isn’t my real name.

🙃

That’s really weird to me.

If I’m playing a board game (like Xiangqi/Chinese Chess) what’s cool is when I spot an opportunity and exploit it. This is playing according to the rules of the game.

If I’m playing a card game (like Fight the Landlord) what’s cool is when I assemble a good combination of cards that drains my hand with inexorable play. Or when I find just the right timing to interfere with someone else draining their cards. Again this is playing according to the rules of the game.

In sportball, presumably when the audience is going wild at a cool play by some player they’re playing according to the rules of the game. (I can’t attest yeah or nay to this because sportball isn’t my vibe.) Is this not cool? (I’ll let sportball fans answer here.)

So why would RPGs be the exception to this? Why do you have to break the rules of play to do cool things?

That’s really weird to me.

I’m talking from the global take on the economy, yes. This wave of AI will go the way of every previous wave: some niche products will use it effectively and the rest of the world will look back with keen embarrassment at this phase of history when people took LLMs seriously.

I mean there’s still practical uses for '50s-era “AI” out there. (“Symbolic AI” was it called?) But it is so tiny a segment it is basically nonexistent.