If there’s one thing China does right

It’s punishment; for cheating; on the gaokao.  I use all those semi-colons deliberately, because it’s my duty to goof on China whenever I can, and the truth of the matter is that I still think the Chinese are the biggest cheaters on the planet, and in spite of their refreshingly Draconian punishment when it comes to their national educational placement exam, they still cheat on just about everything else they think they can get away with.

Sure, they still have problems with Little Emperors running rampant throughout the country, with their parents being completely inept, incapable and unwilling to actually discipline their fucking kids from destroying public displays or museum exhibits, but it’s nice to know that when it comes to education, China is pulling no punches with their aspirations to punish exam cheaters.

I mean seriously, even at my most sadistic, I don’t think I could’ve dreamed up a seven-year jail sentence for cheating on tests.  It certainly seems like it’s severe enough to make would-be cheaters think twice about trying it.  Also, it’s kind of amusing to see what a society with lax cheating ideologies try to play the game of trying to outsmart the exam administrators who are going to some big measures to prevent cheating; all while overlooking the notion that if the effort to cheat were instead diverted to actually studying, then everyone would probably ace the gaokao to begin with.

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The Facebook blackout, continued

At the time I’m writing this, I still haven’t been on Facebook since the last time I said I haven’t been on it.  I think it’s been four weeks now.  Anyone astutely aware of my existence might notice the complete lack of activity from me there, not that I was ever really active in the first place, but combined with the fact that my brog is still down without any timeline of when it will be back up, and I may as well seem like I don’t exist anymore.

There was a part of me that thought about going Facebook dark until my brog gets back up, but given that I have a general understanding of what the current status is, that could be a little while.  However, I don’t really particularly feel like I’ve missed out on anything since I decided to shun checking Facebook outright, instead of fifty times a day like I found myself doing prior. 

In a way, all the articles floating out there lamenting about the anxieties people occasionally feel by not being included in the things that their Facebook friends are blatantly or passive-aggressively boasting about doing, feels kind of true, because me not knowing about the things people are doing means I can’t possibly feel left out or excluded.  Not to mention that I’m not privy to those people out there who use Facebook as a means to vent about the mistakes they make with their lives or just to make poorly veiled jabs at mutually known people and to air out their slightly sweaty but not visibly dirty laundry.

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League of Payforachievements

Since not all of my six readers are League of Legends players, much less gamers at all, I’ll try to kind of start with an analogy that those who have gamed at all within the better part of the last decade might understand.

Achievements, have become a pretty normal thing in today’s gaming landscape, with players getting little pop-up notifications in-game from their systems themselves, when they accomplish particular tasks in the games they are playing.  Ultimately, they’re utterly useless in the grand spectrum of most games, but their existence has created somewhat of a collecting hobby for those who game.

Some achievements are justly achieved by accomplishing monumental feats, like beating Mass Effect 2 on the hardest difficulty without dying once.  Others are as systematically simple as proceeding through the story, and getting an achievement for each notable storyline break point.  There are achievements of insanity, such as completing an entire Left 4 Dead 2 campaign only using a melee weapon.   There are achievements of futility, such as deliberately getting every single question wrong in a round of 1 vs. 100, and then there are achievements of everyone gets a trophy, such as simply starting a game.

The point is, achievements have become somewhat of a point of bragging among gamers, and one of the greatest accomplishments is getting a 100% of achievements earned in games, because usually every game has a good variety of achievements from layups to Hail Marys.  As in the case of XBOX Live, players’ stats have a running tally of how many games they get 100% success rate on, and for players like me, it’s something to be prideful of, to be able to prove just how little of a life I can sometimes have, when I obsess over trying to Boomer Bile over all four survivors in one hurl.

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At what point is trying hard kind of dumb?

Impetus: New York high school student is accepted into all eight Ivy League colleges among other prestigious schools.

First, a lot of people probably think this girl is insufferably arrogant. Yeah yeah, haters gonna hate and all that jazz, but come on now; she applied to all eight Ivy League schools, Johns Hopkins and MIT among other notably prestigious schools? Sure, reach for the stars, but as people are very well aware, college applications ain’t free. I can’t imagine college applications for Ivy League schools are much cheaper than the local commuter school, but seriously.

With the credentials that she had, she was a shoe-in to get into most of the Ivy League schools, had she picked one that she liked the most, as well as perhaps a fallback one or two. Going for all eight, as well as other prestigious schools is most definitely an ego pursuit, to see how many she could get into, regardless of the cost of applying. It’s a no-lose situation where getting into any of them garners the humble-bragging that’s being done now, and any instances of denied entry can be met with simple denial of having applied.

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