“Goddammit, a grandpa showed off to me. It really fucking got to me.
I called an Uber this morning, and the driver was a retired Shanghai grandpa who was just showing off the whole goddamn way.
“I’ve been working for 40 years. I get 9000 in social security every month. I just drive for Uber for fun.”
“My house is in Caohejing. It’s not that expensive, only like 100K a square metre. It’s not nearly as nice as some of my friend’s.”
“You see that license plate on that motorcycle there? That probably cost 600K. My license plate is only 100K.”
“Oh, you’re from Shandong? Shandong people are really bold and reckless. They make mistakes really easily.”
“You work in tech? The environment’s really bad lately. You gotta bear it even if your boss is a huge asshole, cause work is so hard to find.”
Goddammit. If it wasn’t for how he was bigger and stronger than me and I probably can’t win in a fight against him, I would really beat him up!”
Comments say, “Be a little more realistic bro. You can’t drive for Uber once you’re over 59. The system won’t let you pass. Who the hell can retire and then drive for Uber? Think before you start making shit up.”
“I find it’s the same whether with taxis or Ubers, young drivers are usually pretty quiet. Aside from reminding you to put on your seatbelt, they don’t say anything for the whole drive. But most of the older drivers talk nonstop, usually about shit they don’t understand at all. Is it just because nobody talks to old people?”
“See, it’s your own fault for not giving him a bad review.”
“This is what’s up with childbirth. Only social class, manners, appearance (facial features, skin colour, height, head size, etc) passes down through genes. School grades aren’t heritable. Everyone’s IQ is more or less the same. And true success doesn’t come from involution. Girls tend to take after their dads. So if your husband is rich and ugly, you should have sons. Ugly rich girls have to marry a hot poor guy.
A lot of people think that if you have daughters you don’t have to buy houses…well, that assumes your daughter is pretty. If your daughter is ugly, and you didn’t put any effort into providing a house for her, then she’d really have to work and rent her whole life like a peasant. And beauty isn’t even that rare nowadays. I can’t imagine how inflated beauty standards would be by the time our daughters grow up. Picking your mating partners based on beauty is something that’s been trending since the 70s. I guess it’s also kind of human nature.
People in the 50s and 60s were super rough, just married whoever was around them. Honestly, any suffering a kid goes through is fundamentally the result of their parents not trying hard enough. You can say that every kind of life has its highlights, and you don’t have to care about other people’s opinions all you want, but if he’s weak in an East Asian country, he’ll be bullied all his life, and that’s still sad. That’s why every family that claims they’re just a “normal family that doesn’t ask much from their kids” are still pushing their kids like crazy. Nobody really has a choice.”
Comments say, “I mean, I’m pretty sure IQ is inherited, and manners isn’t. That’s taught to you by the family that raises you.”
“Beauty can at least pull people up to middle-class.”
“My dad looks hot as fuck, and I look like a pancake T_T”
An askreddit question, “Just how expensive is war?”
The top-voted reply reads, “You’ve went to primary school for 5 years, middle school for 4 years, high school for 3 years. You’ve spent six figures on education, to teach you literacy, English, advanced maths. You understand the science behind photosynthesis. You know the difference between a predicate and a clause. You can draw graphs to help solve difficult physics problems. You can recite the purpose of the 1911 Revolution. You know about the Single Whip Law. You know about the Six Gentlemen of Wuxu.
You’ve spent countless amounts of money on all kinds of extracurricular classes, from sketching to singing to piano or flute. You have all kinds of performance arts certificates. You’re at repertoire level 7 for piano now.
For the same of your health, your parents spend thousands every month on health supplements for you, calcium and zinc and whatever else. They want you to grow up as healthy and strong as a professional athlete.
You spend every holiday reading Wuxia novels or romances, watch soap operas on TV, play Steam games on your custom built computer.
You have a dog. Its name is honey. You say it’s because he’s so sweet.
You’re planning on going overseas and picking up a craft.
You dream of one day finishing your Master’s Degree or becoming a doctor or engineer.
Suddenly, one day, a black plane passes by the building you live in. The other side of the city is on fire. The park you walk your dog in is filled with tents, crowded with thousands of homeless people. Some are your classmates. Some are your parent’s coworkers.
The next day, the military recruitment office is putting up red banners, summoning you over the radio.
You put on a set of military gear more expensive than an Armani suit, pick up a gun worth the same price as a Chery car, and start rolling and crawling through mud every day to train.
At first, your parents still send you your health supplements. Later on, you stop receiving them. It’s not that they don’t want keep sending them. But the economy is in lockdown. They can’t get their hands on health supplements anymore.
You complain that the food in the cafeteria is getting more and more bland. It’s like they’re not putting any effort into it at all.
But you have no idea, even as you’re crawling through mud, every day, hundreds of millions of RMB is burned on your training. In order to provide you with even such bland and hastily made food, the economic engine of this country is being turned to its limits.
Finally, one day, you’re sent to the battlefield. You cover yourself with a blanket in the trenches, shivering in the snow, complaining about the uselessness of your logistics officers. But this is the results of him throwing every last bit of effort to send you the best winter gear available using even more desperate means than Amazon Next Day Delivery.
You huddle with your comrades as they watch you scoop out the last grain of soy bean from your can of Laoganma [hot sauce]. They swallow as you swipe the last bit of chili oil on your cold and dry bread and gulp it down. Then, you carefully return the glass jar back in your backpack. During war time, a glass jar could be traded for two eggs.
While you’re marching, you give your glass jar to an old grandma. You wanted to trade two eggs for it, but looking at her granddaughter’s high cheekbones and thin face, you only ended up taking one egg. You walked two steps away, then returned and put the egg back in the child’s hands. Because you know, your siblings are home are starving too.
Finally, one day, a bullet smashes through your skull. You fall on the front lines. But thankfully, your unit won the battle. Your comrades load your body onto the truck.
You and your comrade’s bodies pile up on the truck like so many rolls of carpet. There are no coffins. Not even body bags. You’re covered in blood. Your eyes staring blindly at the sky. You’re even still wearing all your ungodly expensive gear—no one even thought to remove them.
Truck after truck, like a parade of death, drives batches of young men to the front line, and batches of young men to the grave.
All of these corpses were just like you. They were raised at all expense by their parents and their country. They all once dreamed of becoming lawyers or doctors or engineers.
Yes, you think that only soldiers are dying, but actually, engineers are dying too.
What’s more expensive is that your piano teacher stopped playing once his students had all gone to the front lines. He picked up a shovel and stared doing cleanup work in the back. Yesterday, he died in the air strike.
Your beloved game studio has shut down from lack of players. Yesterday, a programmer there stayed up all night on watch with you in the fort.
Your favourite Hunan Channel can only play 2 hours of TV every day now because of lack of electricity. 15 minutes of it is taken up by air strike warnings.
The subway you ride to school is empty now, and became an emergency hospital, filled with wounded soldiers and refugees. The stench on them mixes with the carbon dioxide. Some people are sleeping. Some will never wake up.
No one talks in the tunnels. Only the occasional coughing of patients could be heard. Blood trickles across the floor. The black marks on the stairs were no longer formed by glue residue from little ads, but from dried blood.
And the people who could even enter here were already some of the luckiest, because their unfortunate loved ones are burning with the city outside.
A city that generates hundreds of billions of RMB’s worth of GDP every year.
That’s how expensive war is.”
Comments say, “What a preposterous post. Is this the newest way of trying to shatter Chinese people’s morale?”
“America’s so wasteful. They’ve been burning money for 228 years of their 246 year history.”
“China fought with Vietnam for ten years, and neither side fell apart.”
“How many Midi Music Festivals have we held from 2000 to today? Was there any theft at past festivals? It used to be, people who went would buy CDs and cassettes and listen to rock from the beginning. Everyone attended because they loved music. They loved rock. And it was a lifestyle to love music and learn about music.
And these last couple of years, how many people have been complaining? How many people have been stolen from? How many people have ran up on stage to dance and refused to leave?
How many rock CDs do these people own? Do they know what performance they’re even listening to? Have they heard any of the rock classics? They’re all just here to follow the trends. Even the thieves are sneaking in this way.
I’m so upset about this.
And when I look at the comment section, everyone’s saying Midi is held by traitors to China. Or they’re filing complaints against museums for having a round red symbol on their poster for “representing Japan”. It really feels like the world’s gone crazy.”
Comments say, “Midi’s not about rock anymore. People’s changed. Demographics have changed.”
“There’s no point anymore. Music festivals are just another job now.”
“Kids these days don’t listen to rock anymore.”
“Honestly, that shooting in Thailand’s crushed all of their efforts in the past years. Even the royal family sent a representative to visit the victims. That would be unthinkable in the past. Thailand wants to resurrect their tourism industry so badly. But that retard kid jumped out and fired his gun, and now not even God can help them anymore.
A shooting may be no big deal in the west, because westerners already live through shootings every day. But Chinese people are terrified now.
Actually, Thailand doesn’t ban people from owning guns at all. And most Thai people are super friendly. But there are crazy people everywhere, and that’s the worst for the tourism industry. The richest tourists in the world are Chinese people, and that shot just killed any chance of them visiting agin.”
Comments say, “Feel like Japan’s really benefiting from this. At least, I’m too scared to go to South East Asia anymore.”
“This shot tanked Thailand’s tourism industry for at least the next five years.”
“This is all a political conspiracy. The tourism industry doesn’t matter at all. South East Asia’s getting more and more friendly with China, so American-supporters set up a minor to do a terroristic attack to ruin our relationship. It’s so obvious.”
“If there was even a single path, any at all, for disabled women other than marriage, then parents wouldn’t marry off their daughters despite knowing the danger for fear of what’s going to happen to her once they die. And they wouldn’t risk their daughter’s life because they can’t keep up with taking care of her.
No one marries off their disabled daughters overseas, not because the parents are all moral paragons, but because there’s help available for disabled people. For example, a disabled girl is able to go to school still. She doesn’t need her mom to quit her job, or some other family to watch her 24/7. Once she grows up, she can get a job (usually at some kind of charity). And even when her parents die, there are social workers who’ll take care of her. What need is there for her parents to push her to get married then?
But in China, all “feminists” can do is sing the praises of female CEOs and scientists and principles, while ignoring the underclass women who have it the hardest. They never think to actually do anything to help these women. Even the newest fantasy of an “all female apartment” doesn’t include any kind of guarantee for a disabled female to make a living without getting married (being able to feed herself and have a place to live by contributing to housework). It’s always the most successful and accomplished women at the top of the pyramid playing with feminism like a fashion trend.”
Comments say, “This is a problem with social benefits in general, and affects the fundamental social structure of the country. That’s not something feminism can change. All feminism can do about this is, if you’re underclass, then you can influence your children and try to get them into jobs that allow them to change society. And if you’re an elite, then you can use your own influence to slowly change existing society. This isn’t something that can happen overnight. It’s going to be a long battle.”
“Lisa’s posted her Crazy Horse photos. The caption reads “Crazy Horse is a wonderful place. They can call me any time.””
Comments say, “Back when I liked KPOP, Lisa really had a ton of fans. She’s always been the top 2 in the team in terms of popularity. She’s really been such a bad example to her fans.
“I mean, sex work is legal in Thailand anyways, and she’s got prior experience. Even if she legit opened a brothel in Bangkok, I wouldn’t be surprised.”
“She can strip any time? She’s prepared to strip at any time?”
Lisa is looking pretty and happy in the Crazy Horse photos. I think that she is technically on hiatus as an idol now as Blackpink hasn't signed new contracts yet. I wonder if this will trigger the return of sexy concepts in kpop after 10 years of absence.