A loosely DnD-based storygame for a campaign I had in mind, but never got to writing.

comic sans, pride colors, and wings on profile picture screams mental psyche that hasn't left 2009 and the world is more terrible for it

Trans-trans, when you decide to transition away from transitioning and settle for genital rot and whispy soft hairs on your chin.

So does it swallow it whole or chew?

You can if you posted more often.

What the fuck have you done.

It's taken me 2 minutes to even load up the thread.

It's a Hesbollah house party, for sure.

A

At behest of Mizal

Impressed I was to scrawl in here

An odd poem; how queer

That among many peers I should

Write a rhyme in short time

While being 'yond my prime.  God, why?

WMT250117C145 

Either go bankrupt or make a fuckton of money off of this option, God help me.

tl;dr yeah it's mostly fine if you're there as an exchange / expat to accrue experience, but eating imported ingredients, following local customs, and taking health risks with a surge in specific kinds of cardiovascular diseases similar to COVID does leave you in more danger if you're not taking extra precautions to watch what you say, eat, and simply be at.  culturally, the south of china is more cosmopolitan than the north and most of the inland, but the CCP pushes han superiority about as strongly as Europe pushes diversity: hard enough to create a loud minority, with the added benefit of having gov't-controlled speech to always push things in favor of their vision.

societally you're not going to see much of what's real and what's a facade until you head into the countryside.  whereas the US has a stock market propped up on inflated numbers, China has a housing market propped up on inflated numbers.  You can see entire shell cities with less than a proper skeleton crew doing less than basic maintenance, and there's constant and dramatic floods and droughts due to the excess of dams built along its rivers.  Food and water security are also affected greatly by this, and when combined with the often-mandatory lockdowns that literally lets the authorities weld people shut inside their own homes, it means that a country that shouldn't have issues of famine ends up having famine in major metropolitan zones.  Real estate is a nightmare and you're going to be confined to relatively expensive housing (not like Taiwan is so much different, being an island, but either way if your local gov't is sponsoring the trip it shouldn't be terrible).  If you youtube video something like "china weld lockdown" you should see plenty of videos discussing this sort of stuff in greater detail.

So yeah, when you're in the CCP's home turf, your gov't has relatively little in the way of giving you extra protections / leniency as it does in Taiwan, which is much more diplomatically proficient than mainland China.  You can at least say stupid shit while you're learning Mandarin, but the Taiwanese dialect may be less spoken abroad.  I have no idea if they even teach Cantonese in Taiwan to foreigners.

Personally, I think going to Taiwan might be a safer bet, particularly because of how much more competitive it is as a nation to try and train competent people -- even foreign students -- to keep its leverage in the larger scheme of things.  They're strong in the STEM field and have TSMC and UMC to prove it, as well as a competent public education system to ensure Taiwanese-born engineers are fed into those foundries.  Also because -- while it isn't as absolutely free as the US is in speech -- it beats Singapore and mainland China in being able to discuss any and all topics as needed in the region.  Being able to ask all kinds of questions, however smart or stupid, helps in that regard.  And you'lll still have internet access beyond the Great Firewall that China has, which means you'll still get to use Youtube, Google, etc. instead of CCP-sponsored websites.

China, being that much bigger of a country, can have a lot of opportunities to have hits and misses with its level of education that it may provide to you, on top of all the other non-academic related topics mentioned above.