She told me to check the fortune-telling book instead, the annually published manual written by 林真 (lin4 zhen1). Within were several pages of what I thought to be those names I was looking for, but she told me those were for writing letters.
I was shocked. There was a separate set of titles for writing to each relative!! Speaking and writing both have their own set. I didn't know that before. Just one set is complex enough, but TWO?! No wonder my mum laughed at me when she saw me learn to write letters in Chinese in primary or secondary school. It was probably not even a piece of cake for her!
Anyway, the set I was searching for turned out to be missing. That wasn't abnormal because such contents are usually inconsistently included in this book. Oh well...
That's one advantage of living in a nuclear family - less need to learn all these terms. When my mum was little, she used to live in a gigantic family so she had to learn all these titles by heart. She probably didn't find it difficult since she'd have to say them all the time anyway. But for me, the only relatives I know whom I can regard as "distant" are my granduncle and great-grandaunt. So all I know are the titles for these two, plus the usual cousin and uncle/aunt stuff. If I ever have children, they'll never need to know all these. I find this thought sad.
Hackers changed road signs to warn drivers of zombies ahead. I think this is pretty hilarious. Of course, that is assuming the signs weren't actually displaying anything important like a warning of an accident ahead or something.
I'm curious about Little Lamplight in Fallout 3. It's little city of children in a huge underground cavern where anyone above 16 would be kicked out. The thing is, it's been 200 years since the original children survived the nukes in there, so... where did all these children come from? They definitely didn't come from those monsters next door in the Vault. Speaking of which, how the heck did mere children protect themselves from the Super Mutants next door for 200 years? How much lead did they pack in there? The Fallout Wiki states that there is no answer to all that. They just happened in the game. :(
I was right about the Shishkebab being the best melee weapon in Fallout 3, but there are guns with better damage than it. The best I see so far is the Experimental MIRV that deals over 30 times as much damage (I'm looking at the Damage Per Second, aka DPS, here so while my Shishkebab deals 80DPS the MIRV deals over 2500DPS).
I'm probably going to choose that together with specializing in Sneak if I'm ever going to play this game again. However, that's not exactly going to be easy to use since its ammo is the Mini-Nuke while is rather limited in supply within the game. Plus the Mini-Nuke is exactly what its name says, so it's pretty poor for close combat.
According to the Fallout Wiki, the Experimental MIRV is like an automatic bazooka that shoots nukes. Though its damage is the most obscene in the game, it uses up its ammo really quickly. The reason behind this is that it shoots exactly EIGHT Mini-Nukes per shot. Therefore, it kills anything in the game with one shot, even the Super Mutant Behemoth. I so want to see it now that I've read this.
After a while, melee fighting is getting too boring. It's so easy! This is even more true when I'm walking towards places I haven't discovered and meet some Raiders on the way. I usually don't even see them till they shoot at me. Then I'd run towards them, all the while thinking," Why hello there! Nice to meet you too," as I slash at their heads.
Maybe some sneaking around would make it more fun, plus attacks while undetected will cause extra damage. If I use VATS to attack, it'd be even better since VATS is supposed to increase damage at the expense of the condition of the weapon.
Gradually, the Sword of Truth series has been increasingly filled with long speeches that are very likely the author's own beliefs. Mostly, these long speeches deal with life, the meaning and the importance of it.
However, the final book, Confessor, has so many of these rants I actually skipped a number of pages. This was especially true at the end where Richard Rahl, the main protagonist, made a speech of about 5 pages long. Wtf dude? I read half a page and realized he wasn't going to stop, so I flipped the page and scanned through the next two pages. Realizing that there was no pause nor interruption, I flipped again to find that Richard was indeed a very long-winded guy.
The whole series bears a similarity to my blog - it's filled with rants, except that his rants are usually about life. Mine do not have a consistent topic.
But it's weird to find that eventually, everyone seems to talk like Richard. Even Nicci was able to give long speeches in this last book. I think this series is really one whole rant disguised with some fiction to make it look like a novel series. The author is really trying to convince his readers to make choices about their lives and etc. Some sort of propaganda.
The way I see it, the author probably had very strict parents who didn't give him any freedom. Either that or he feels he doesn't have any freedom in is life.
Another set of octuplets born in California with all of them still alive as for this moment. If a normal childbirth is magic, I can't find the right word to describe this.
So I was told that my great-grandaunt didn't go to university and only my paternal grandfather did. Instead, she only had secondary-school-level education and became a midwife somewhere in Penang. Never really returned to Indonesia where she and my great-grandfather were from. For one, there was and still is rampant racism against the Chinese.
So my grandfather was born in Indonesia. She was adopted by his mother, my great-grandmother. After my father was born, my grandfather went to China due a combination of the racism mentioned and the propaganda that reached his ears about how well the Chinese live together in mainland China.
I guess it was probably good at first till the chaos came. The idea of Communism was not the killer, but the masses twisted the whole thing to hurt all those people they were jealous of, mainly anyone who was wealthy and/or well-educated. My grandfather, being a pharmacist with a Bachelors degree, could not escape from the unfair persecution.
It sucks, that's for sure. For an educated person who even knew Latin, it definitely sucks to find himself out of job while living in a society where the poor reigns. Well, at least no one commited suicide in the family, though my father did get conscripted and brainwashed by Mao's charisma.
Though it probably wouldn't have been very healthy for me if he told me about why he loved Mao Zedong so much while I was younger, I'm now actually quite interested in his side of the story. I find all those things I read too Americanized, ie everything is biased against Communism. You win some, you lose some.
I knew my ears were always too waxy. Not that I don't wash them, but they just produce inconvenient amounts of wax all the time. And I can't wash them as often as it'll take to keep it completely clean since ears need wax. The last time I cleaned it everyday, I eventually got an infection in one of my ears and the doctor told me to clean them less frequently.
By the way I'm referring to the insides of my ears where you can only either dig or rinse.
It is quite annoying because I don't have the solid sort of wax that most people seem to have. Mine is quite fluid, so I can feel it flowing inside my ear sometimes when I tilt my head for long, eg when I'm sleeping. It is a little disturbing when you feel stuff flowing inward.
But today I just realized another inconvenience - I can't put on my earphones for hours. This is rather disgusting but... wax flowed onto one of the earphones. It was extremely annoying, to say the least. Of course I cleaned it immediately, but it was hard to keep it off the part where it produced sound.
Headphones would be the only alternative, but it's not convenient to wear it constantly the way I do with earphones, which I hang around my neck like some sort of necklace. A headphone can be worn the same way too, around my neck, but it's irritating if I have to turn my head.
I have seen some students walking around with a headset around their necks and sometimes on their heads, but somehow I don't think it's comfortable. At the very least, earphones don't weigh anything. Plus headphones press my hair down, making some sort of horizontal valley on top of my head after a few hours of usage, unless I get those that go behind my head when I wear them.
Anyway, I wonder why I seem to be the only one who wears earphones with the wire down the back, instead of the front. I keep the wires hidden inside my shirt on the back and I wear it constantly when I'm out. The main benefit is that it never gets in my way. Out of sight, out of mind, whenever I'm not using it. I keep the earphones under my collar sometimes when I don't need them.
The only thing that isn't good is probably the sweat that may make the wire sticky. Somehow I don't think that's a problem since I don't feel anything after months of wearing it.
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