You’re welcome to stick around and expand your knowledge of China and the rest of the world beyond what your mainstream media shows you.

You don’t even need to agree with us politicaIly to recognize that the mainstream media lies to you. One of the best ways to get an unfiltered view of another country is just to go watch some travel vlogs, and China is no exception.

That’s interesting that you’d say that because personally i’ve always thought that if i ever go to China it would definitely not be to Shanghai or Beijing, at least not for my first trip.

Main reason being that Shanghai is too westernized (which is why i won’t be going to HK either) and Beijing is too touristy. If i’m going to China i want to see the real China, not the parts where all the western tourists flock to. Even if i have to struggle with the language barrier.

I find that in any country it’s the non-touristy parts that tend to be the most beautiful and fulfilling to visit. Also from what i’ve seen Beijing and Shanghai are quite expensive compared to the “smaller” cities.

You’re not alone. I didn’t like Tyranny either and i am normally a pretty big fan of CRPGs. For some reason that game really missed the mark for me, but i can’t explain why.

Dungeon crawlers

Have you heard of Vaporum? It’s a neat little dungeon crawler in the vein of Legend of Grimrock but steampunk.

Darkest Dungeon probably doesn’t count since it’s more of a rogue-like than a crawler, plus pretty much everyone’s played it or heard of it.

CRPGs

I suppose since you’ve played Pathfinder you must have played Pillars of Eternity too. If not, I highly recommend it, it’s one of the best modern CRPGs imo, very much in the vein of the classics like Baldur’s Gate 2.

Divinity: Original Sin was good as well. And of course there’s Dragon Age: Origins which is great, but sadly the rest of that series is fairly mediocre. I’m not a big Bioware fan.

Macabre horror

Have you played Little Nightmares? There’s also a couple of creepy Point and Click adventures that i really liked such as Fran Bow and Little Misfortune.

“Nautical games”

This isn’t a genre i’m very familiar with but I’ve heard Sunless Sea is quite good if you’re into that sort of game, and it’s got a bit of a Lovecraft-y aesthetic/lore. Haven’t played it myself though.

Open-world games

This is a long shot since these games are so old by now that probably most people interested in open world RPGs have played them (or haven’t given them a try because the graphics/controls are too outdated) but Gothic 1 and 2 are some of my favorite open world games of all time.

That’s about it for what I can recommend in the genres you mentioned. I’m more into strategy games myself (mainly turn-based but also some RTS and city builders), i can recommend a bunch of those if you want but my experience with other genres is a bit more limited.

I see. Thank you for pointing this out, i was under the impression that Europe still mostly relied on GPS. Shows my age i guess.

I’m not talking about physical infrastructure, and the handful of European companies/brands you mentioned are small fish compared with the US giants. Yes a lot of Europeans work in tech, but the vast majority of them rely on US products to do so, and a good chunk of them work in European subsidiaries of US companies.

The point i’m making is that Europeans for the most part rely on digital monopolies controlled by the US which are subject to the whims of the US government and which co-operate with and are also to varying degrees infiltrated by the US intelligence agencies and the national security state. This gives the US government a lot of control over an important sector of your economy, not to mention a direct pipeline to the minds of your citizens.

A sovereign state would see this digital colonization by another country’s monopolies as a serious national security threat. China for example made sure that Chinese citizens predominantly use Chinese social media platforms instead of allowing them to become dependent on the US’s. But as another commenter pointed out, Europe is not sovereign, it is a collection of US vassals.

Alright, i stand corrected.

But just as a thought experiment: say the US decides tomorrow to cut Europe off from American GPS satellites. Could Europe still function only relying on their own satellite network? I’m not just talking about individual navigation apps, i’m talking about European airlines, European militaries (in this scenario let’s say NATO doesn’t exist and Europeans actually have armies and aren’t just isn’t glorified hosts for American bases), etc.

And who even uses it?

And how many of those companies rely on US digital infrastructure and US platforms?

Maybe. I haven’t read that book either.

The real problem is not this regulation, the problem is that while Europe has a tech market it functionally doesn’t have its own tech sector. Europe is entirely dependent on American tech especially in digital platforms. We don’t have our own social media platforms, we don’t have our own version of Google or Amazon… Europe doesn’t even have its own version of GPS which makes it dependent on tech that essentially belongs to the US military. This is so stupid that it boggles the mind, it means giving up your digital sovereignty to another country. If Europe had its own tech sector then it could force that sector to change the way they do things to abide by European regulations, but as is US tech can just choose to no longer do business in Europe if they don’t feel like following the regulations. Europe can’t shut them down or nationalize them because all of these companies are American. Europe has been digitally colonized by the US, and we saw with that ridiculous crash a week ago where that gets you.

I have no experience with game development so i can’t speak on what that takes, but the difficulty of modding very much depends on the game. Paradox games for instance are generally extremely easy to mod, pretty much anyone can learn to do it, though the skill ceiling can be quite high depending on how deep you want to get into more complicated scripting and/or 3D modeling new assets.

Whether or not these skills translate to making your own game i don’t know. But if you are interested in giving that a try that i think the place to start is perhaps a tutorial for one of the more commonly used engines like Unity.

I usually use Yandex, i find it gives better results than Google with non-Western languages. A lot of browsers nowadays also have their own in-built translation plugins.

Just out of curiosity, what tool did you use to translate? Because the plugin that i use gives slightly different (but also not great) results.

I was thinking of doing a comparison at some point of a few different ones to see which gives the least awkward result translating from Chinese.

The translation is…not great.

Well, well, well…how the tables turn.

One more thing i’ll add is that i’m always struck by how well these songs fit what is happening in Palestine. One day the whole world will look on the brave fighters who are today resisting that horrific occupation and genocide the same way that we look at the Irish rebels today:

But the bravest fell, and the requiem bell Rang mournfully and clear For those who died that Eastertide In the springing of the year. And the world did gaze in deep amaze At those fearless men and true Who bore the fight that freedom’s light Might shine through the foggy dew.

Great song and very moving lyrics. For a more light hearted tune i also like The Starry Plough.

This is an extremely serious issue and unfortunately not many people know about or understand it. Too many still believe that if something is open source then it can’t have malicious code and backdoors in it, but unfortunately that’s just not the case. We already knew that the mainstream platforms and western made hardware all have built in backdoors and co-operate with the intelligence agencies, but that this is now extending to the more fringe alternative platforms and OSS as well is very worrisome.

And there is nothing that guarantees that just because they managed to fend off one attempt at infiltration that no further attempts were already made and maybe even successful. I think that where this is all heading toward is that at some point people for who privacy and security against western governments is essential will have no choice but to use exclusively Russian and Chinese made products. Yes those will undoubtedly have backdoors for their respective states as well, but as long as they do not share their intelligence with the West i frankly couldn’t care less if they know what i’m up to. The main government that you need to be worried about is always the one in your own country, doubly so if you live in the imperial core.

That’s the ideal of course. In practice you can’t always be that thorough.