Annoying Questions I'd Like Answered...

CatharzGodfoot · Post by **CatharzGodfoot** » Wed Jul 07, 2010 2:37 am

Count Arioch the 28th wrote:Although you can show penises in porn now, it's still illegal to sell dildos that look like penises in Japan.

Although they still have the traditional Shinto penis festival:

Where you can buy ancient-style good luck charms:

Cynic · Post by **Cynic** » Wed Jul 07, 2010 2:57 am

you know I never thought about tentacle dildos... but I guess that has to exist.

This is what Tokyo's neverwhere city would look like.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Wed Jul 07, 2010 4:25 am

CatharzGodfoot wrote:
Count Arioch the 28th wrote:Although you can show penises in porn now, it's still illegal to sell dildos that look like penises in Japan.
Where you can buy ancient-style good luck charms:

That's my kind of luck.

Cynic wrote:you know I never thought about tentacle dildos... but I guess that has to exist.

They do. In several permutations

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Wed Jul 07, 2010 5:55 am

Now granted, they change the censorship law about as often as they change their socks, but I thought uncensored genitals were still banned in Japan? Or possibly they still use the mosaics/blurs/hilariously useless tiny black bars just to cover their asses in the event that the law changes back.

Or maybe Japanese people actually have those mosaics in real life. That would be really annoying. Imagine getting checked out by a medical practitioner.

"I'm sorry, I just can't find the problem due to this huge mosaic."

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Wed Jul 07, 2010 6:40 am

well, if they do, I can state it isn't (necessarily) a dominant trait.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Thu Jul 08, 2010 7:08 am

New question:
What "exactly" is the deal with Tibet? I looked it up on Wikipedia, but the first part reads like a text book... a very boring text book, that doesn't convey it's info (to me at least) very well.

So, is Tibet close enough in culture to China that, say, a person making an Asian campaign setting could treat their mythologies as roughly the same for picking races and stuff?

CatharzGodfoot · Post by **CatharzGodfoot** » Thu Jul 08, 2010 7:15 am

Prak_Anima wrote:New question:
What "exactly" is the deal with Tibet? I looked it up on Wikipedia, but the first part reads like a text book... a very boring text book, that doesn't convey it's info (to me at least) very well.

So, is Tibet close enough in culture to China that, say, a person making an Asian campaign setting could treat their mythologies as roughly the same for picking races and stuff?

Tibet is run by mad reincarnated priest-kings and their templars. China is run by a celestial bureaucracy.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Thu Jul 08, 2010 7:18 am

hm... that's an interesting point... and could really put the whole Tibet/China thing on it's head in the campaign setting... maybe make the Tibet analogue a solitary independent region in the middle of Xuaonwu

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Thu Jul 08, 2010 8:11 am

I'm currently playing in a freeform-ish game where I was hired to free the oppressed Tibetans from the Chinese tyrants. Except ended up siding with the "tyrants", seeing as their main evils seemed to be:
[*]Giving everyone insulation in their houses*
[*]Defying the "natural order" bullshit by striving for better things in life

The Tibetan mythology, and the culture that spawned from it, seems to be pretty shitty. And it does have significant differences to those of main China. Consider that one is built on "This is your place in life. You will accept it and like it." and the other one says "When there are plagues and shit, it means the Emperor has lost the mandate of heaven, so you should stab him in the face."

Big differences ensue in the worlds formed.

*Guaranteed to be better than those from the Rudd government.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Thu Jul 08, 2010 10:34 am

Tibetan Buddhism is way more similar to Mongolian Buddhism than it is to Chinese or Khmer Buddhism. It's pretty fatalistic and honestly pretty violent and repressive.

The international pressure to "Free Tibet" is wholly cynical and created by the intelligence agencies of The United States and India. The region is no more oppressed and has no greater claim to independence than Inner Mongolia or Xianjing.

Periodically Chinese government troops go into Tibetan villages and rough people up or shoot them for being political dissidents. But Chinese government troops do that everywhere. There's no special reason to harp about Tibetan oppression. Back when the Dalai Lama ran the show, it was a slave-holding monarchy. The "Free Tibet" meme is kept alive by the active and continuous assistance of covert operatives. In much the same way as China funds Naxalites and the Sudanese. Stupid cold war-esque brinksmanship.

-Username17

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Thu Jul 08, 2010 11:14 am

could someone who has a clue give me a quick break down of the religious philosophies of Tibet, Mongolia, (pre-communist) china, and the Ainu people? because I'm kinda lost with wikipedia as my main means of research for this shit...

mean_liar · Post by **mean_liar** » Thu Jul 08, 2010 2:32 pm

They were all animists.

Mongolia
http://www.iras.ucalgary.ca/~volk/sylvia/Magic.htm
http://www.face-music.ch/bi_bid/historyoftengerism.html

Tibet
http://www.jcrows.com/reynoldsshaman.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%B6n

Ainu
http://www.everyculture.com/East-Southe ... lture.html
http://cultural-anthropology.suite101.c ... aido_japan

Crissa · Post by **Crissa** » Thu Jul 08, 2010 6:06 pm

There's one that's pre-Buddhism that is basically the same as Buddhism, too... I forgot what it was called.

-Crissa

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Tue Jul 13, 2010 2:41 am

burning dvds that play on dvd players

So, far as I can tell, if I take an avi and convert to a mpeg-2, it should play, right?

Count Arioch the 28th · Tue Jul 13, 2010 2:42 am

It depends on the DVD player. I know that's a bad answer, but some are different from what I saw when I sold the things a year back. Some will play a variety of video files, some are limited (newer ones tend to play more kinds, but this is not always the case).

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Tue Jul 13, 2010 2:59 am

Well, what's the basic format? I mean, do older dvds seriously not play on newer machines?

Count Arioch the 28th · Tue Jul 13, 2010 12:34 pm

According to WIKI, MPEG-2 is the default. Newer DvD players will recognize a wider variety, but for the most part DvD's use MPEG-2

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Tue Jul 13, 2010 5:07 pm

ok, cool, glad I'm not the only person who reached that conclusion.

What's the best way to burn dvds, on that note?

Crissa · Post by **Crissa** » Tue Jul 13, 2010 10:26 pm

With MPEG2, you can encode far more data than some players can decode or read from their drive, however.

Of course, this means that some DVDs are in HD quality, while others... Aren't.

-Crissa

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Wed Jul 14, 2010 1:11 am

I just want to take downloaded tv episodes (in avi format) and burn them in a way that they'll play on a DVD player in addition to a computer...
suggestions?

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Fri Jul 16, 2010 9:53 am

Could anyone tell me about the Cloud OS thing from more than a technical point of view? I mean, technical is great and all, but it doesn't really convey what it's like to use it...

Crissa · Post by **Crissa** » Fri Jul 16, 2010 8:06 pm

It's really a fancy way of saying client-server terminal where the server is played by a proxy, so you don't have a specific server.

-Crissa

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Fri Jul 16, 2010 8:08 pm

Crissa... I'm sorry, thank you, but I'm not really a computer person, other than some basic affinity for them, so that meant less to me than Wiki's description of it as basically using a browser as an OS.

Crissa · Post by **Crissa** » Fri Jul 16, 2010 8:35 pm

A terminal is a dumb connection which merely displays information. It's like an early browser, but designed to send commands. It's where we get the monitor and keyboard from. A server is a large computer designed to communicate with many clients. A client can be another server, a terminal, or anything inbetween.

So yes, a simple way of saying it is that you're surfing your browser to your computer, but your computer is really whichever server has time or is closest to serve you.

Like say, a celphone and its tower. You don't care which tower you're talking to, and in fact, don't know. You type in your command on the celphone, and the nearest tower selects itself and routes your command to the switch. Most of the early voice controls and such were actually a form of cloud - you'd say something, and your celphone would send it to a tower, which would send it to a server, which would tell the celphone or network switch what you meant.

-Crissa

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Fri Jul 16, 2010 8:57 pm

huh, ok thanks Crissa.

Now, what's like to use? annoying? or does it work?