I watched a few movies recently and made a dice game.

Haven’t journaled in a few days (about a week) but didn’t do anything terribly exciting besides spending time with people, watch movies, and bash my head into a wall learning more about ML. I’m alone here at the house and am starting to get a bit stir-crazy, but at least I can wander around naked and cook at 2am.

I’ve been getting into the habit of sleeping at 4-5am and waking up after noon, which seems to be my default but non-optimal state. So I did the usual method of waking up late and then staying up all night and sleeping the next evening. So I woke up at 4pm on Saturday, didn’t sleep Saturday night, and planned to sleep at 4pm but fell asleep at 2pm accidentally. So this morning I woke up awake at 1pm and forced myself to sleep until I woke up at 9am. This did the trick and now hopefully if I get to sleep at a reasonable time from now on I’ll be up before 10am!

As for self-learning: I’ve been neglecting this besides reading through an ML textbook. I’m back into chess via correspondence games but having a hard time getting in the mood to improve my github/gitlab projects. Next will be chantrending, though, since it deals with data collection and analysis, which could be a good application of ML.

I’m continuing the article about the street I live on. I found out something interesting the other day as well, that the market on my street is where the first instance bird flu in the provence came about. This bodes well as I pass the live chicken salespeople on my way to the main street.

I’ve also started writing a story. Given the nature of the plot, it is not something I want to talk about publicly, but I’m making steady progress. To help with this I’m reading The Oxford Essential Guide to Writing (ISBN 9780425176405) to understand the fundamentals since I’ve never take a writing course.

Chinese

Watched a Chinese movie: 有种你爱我. It’s a lot like your typical Chinese B-movie where it has an easy-to-follow plot and pretty low production value. I still found it a fun watch though! The plot is simple; Sweet-talking playboy 查义 beds every woman he finds until he meets his match with a strong girl named 小欣 who chokes him during sex and kicks him out after. She was only looking to have a baby and becomes a single mother of her own volition 9 months later. 查义 tries to take part in his son’s life.

There’s some great stuff in here, like when they have 查义 since a song at the funeral and break into a incomprehensible (and unsubtitled) english song, or the 儿话-speaking extras at the restaurant demanding ashtrays. The movie turns into an entirely different kind movie when they involve the family of 查义 towards the end.

Learned some Chinese phrases/words/constructions:

• “男人没有一个是省油的灯” - All men are trouble, or “Men doesn’t have a single ‘fuel efficient lamp’ (something easy to deal with)”
• 男人婆 - Tomboy
• 要想生活过得去，头上就得顶点绿 - “If you want to live well, you have to have a bit of green on your head,” where green refers to the “wearing a green hat” of being cuckolded.

Beyond this, since I’m watching so many movies, it’s a good idea for me to watch more ones in Chinese! So I’m watching one called 阳光灿烂的日子 which is about some children left alone during the cultural revolution, getting into trouble in their town.

Also I’m still working on that 文言文 textbook.

Tabletop

I’m trying to make a china-based setting and adventure for Dungeons and Dragons 5e to play when I get home, we’ll see how this goes. The method of choosing a characters is going to be based on doing Yi Jing divination to generate a character background.

I already ran a game here in China with some friends that never played again, with a setting of Qing Dynasty China. It went well and I want to replicate that success in the US.

A Dice Game

After a really fun night in a bar over a few beers, I developed a dice-game for getting to know each other based on Kings and other games I’ve played with the same theme. There’s a paper from 1997 called The Experimentatal Generation of Interpersonal Closeness (find it here) that I drew inspiration from. There are three increasingly personal/serious sets of questions, and a different paper by him has the experiment ending with four minutes of eye contact. In my experience playing this game with other people, it really did make us have a much better time with each other.

This was inspired after watching the movie The Lobster which is a dark dystopian comedy about the nature of couples and dating where any single person is imprisoned in an institution, and if they do not find a partner within 45 days they are turned into an animal. Watch it and you’ll see what I mean.

It’s not designed for people to get wasted, but more for discussions and light/medium drinking. Activities that involve the entire table have a lower probability (around 11%) as they are a bit intensive for those having side conversations but are necessary to bring the game together. Questions involving two players interacting with personal questions is about 67%. The chances of somebody drinking is over.

It’s a shame that some of them are not phonetic, like in Kings where “9 is Rhyme.” But I did get some that make sense like “4 is Fortuneteller” or “2 is eyes.”

Method of Play

Objective: The point of the game is to get know other people better and drink a bit.

Materials: A circle of 2 or more people and two dice. Optional but recommended: Alcoholic beverages.

Rules: Players go in a circle clockwise rolling the dice, youngest player starting. The outcome of the roll is the sum of the two dice. Each number has an action associated with it, listed below.

Most actions have two actors, the roller and the target. After rolling, if the instructions for the rule call for a target, the roller must roll one more die. Counting clockwise from the player, the target is the number of people around the table from the player. If there are more than six players, use two dice.

• 2 Eyes: Make eye contact with the target until the next player finishes their turn This must be done regardless of if someone blinks or if the target or player takes part in the next turn. If someone breaks contact before then, they must drink twice.
• 3 Rhyme: The roller says a word and everyone must name a rhyme around the table. Whoever does not first must drink.
• 4 Fortuneteller: The target must make a prediction about the roller’s future.
• 5 Complement: The target must tell a genuine complement to the roller.
• 6 Common: The target must tell the roller something the two of them have in common, or work together to find a commonality.
• 7 Drink: Drink and roll again. If 7 is rolled again, the roller must choose someone and have them drink, then roll again.
• 8 Would-You-Rather Question: The roller asks the target a would-you-rather question.
• 9 Tricky Question: The roller asks the target a tricky, personal, or embarrassing question.
• 10 Romantic Question: The roller asks the target a romantic or sexual question.
• 11 Categories: The roller names a category, and everyone must name something within this category. Whoever does not first must drink.
• 12 Rulemaker: The roller can create a rule or change any rule for the game. Examples include changing the assignment of one number to another question, having anyone drink if they say the word “I,” or having every player take off their shoes.

Things I’m Liking

• Understanding Debian: A nice large picture of my favorite linux distro explaining the different branches, differences between major versions, and development.
• Gorilla vs. Bear: A texas-based music blog for indie music. It looks to be a bit outside the Pitchfork sphere which is always a good thing for discoverability in my opinion.
• laarc: Another hackernews clone, but more focused on being a publicly-facing personal bookmark aggregator. I’ve found that these sort of low-activity link aggregators (like lobste.rs) have more unique and interesting links, while sites like hackernews and popular subreddits are better for news like software releases or events.
• A Guide to Art House Films: A series of three guides ranging from “entry level” to “high level” art-house films. Their classification for levels is based on their accessibility. It’s a good way at least to select some movies to watch over the coming months.
• Anydice: The most comprehensive dice rolling application I’ve ever seen. It is simple at first glance, allowing you to say something like output 2d6 and see the probabilities or roll the dice. But there’s a comprehensive scripting language to simulate any aspect of dice rolls, even something complicated like the system of Qin: The Warring States.

Misc

The coffee shop I’m at has a playlist of 10 songs, and our DJ Barista likes the song It Ain’t Me by Selena Gomez enough to repeat it right after it finishes. Since it’s playing on his phone, sometimes he will get a phone call which is broadcast over the speakers around the cafe until he disables the bluetooth. The internet sometimes gets very slow, and is fixed by me going over and power cycling the router. Fun times in China!

To test my typing speed I checked out typeracer and got over 100wpm on the few races I did. But after extended typing my wrists start getting sore. Can’t wait to get an ergonomic keyboard when I get home.

I changed the name of these journals a bit to take “Journal: " out of the title. This is one of those instances where vim macros come in handy!

When buying oranges at my usual vendor a few days ago, the shopkeeper asked me where I was from then started commenting on American politics, particularly Trump and the recent shutdown. After a while chatting I realized that he was trying to get to the “Orderly and Safe China is better than Disorganized and Dangerous United States” thesis that many old folks his age really like to push to foreigners. Still a nice chat though!

Things are definitely winding down towards New Years. Shops are filling with 年货 and the usual small talk with the locals is about what my plans are for New Years. It won’t be long until a lot of the shops close with a “Gone home for new years” sign on the door.