MiShMaSh

Hack and slasH online and off

Grinding your way up to that powerful magic sword is a tough task in most online games, requiring hours of effort hacking away. China has seen controversies over“gold mining” by real-life prisoners engaged in 9-to-5 jobs in virtual worlds, resulting in virtual credits being sold for real cash, but recently one gaming addict swapped gold for lumber when he started stealing trees to pay for his virtual gaming habit. No, they weren’t virtual trees. According to the China Business View, a 24-year-old Shaanxi man surnamed Fan made about 10,000 RMB (1,440 USD) by stealing 686 trees from neighbors and selling them, all to buy items in online games. Apparently his virtual magical items didn’t grant him a stealth bonus, because he was caught while trying to fl ee at a Xi’an train station. - daVid daWSon

Having a Word WiTH 2016

A list of top terms of 2016 was put together by the National Language Resources Monitoring and Research Center, The Commercial Press, and People.cn in their annual Chinese Characters and Words (漢語盤點) event, which tallies the words and phrases most representative of 2016. The character of the year is 規(guī) (gu~), “regulation, rules,” a reference to the anti-corruption movement. The phrase of the year is 小目標 (xi2om&bi`o), “a small goal”; no doubt a favorite for netizens, this phrase trended because China’s richest man, Wang Jianlin, suggested that young people just starting out should start with a “small goal” of earning their first 10 million RMB. Internationally, the character was 變 (bi3n, change) and the phrase was 一帶一路 (y! d3i y! l&), “One Belt, One Road.”- liu jue (劉玨)

TrasHing road rage

A sanitation worker in Hefei, Anhui province, became a viral sensation after he encountered a car that had blatantly been parked in an illegal parking area for hours, without consideration for emergency access or, more importantly for him, trash pickup. So he did what any enraged-but-creative sanitation worker would do. He began to arrange the 40 trash bins into a square grid surrounding the black SUV. Web users were delighted, as no doubt many recalled their own instances of road rage and cheered on this champion of justice. - d.d.

panda-monium

You do not throw things at pandas. Ever. You just don’t throw things at pandas unless you’re willing to incur the wrath of a billion angry people. Especially not a baby panda. You’d think this was obvious, but apparently it wasn’t to some particularly ignorant tourists at the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding in December, 2016. To make matters worse (for them), they were caught on film. Fortunately, when the tourists threw a fig into the panda enclosure, it only landed near the sleeping panda cub, whom they were most likely attempting to wake up. A guard was cited in the Chengdu Business Daily as saying that“often” tourists threw things to try to wake up pandas, including rocks. Amid all the howling outrage online, netizens have pointed out that at present there are no blacklists or rules with any teeth to curb this kind of behavior. - d.d.

2,000-year-old soup

Demonstrating conclusively that there is no such thing as a use-by date, archeologists in Henan province were thrilled in December when they came across a bowl of beef soup that dates back to the Warring States period (475 BCE – 221 BCE). Mostly, they found ox bones in the bowl, indicating that the ancient Chinese liked their soup pretty chunky. Media reports were at first confused, and it turned out that what was thought to be actual liquid soup discovered by the team was just water that had seeped into the bowl and mingled with remnant soup matter. Perhaps this is why there was no taste test. It wasn’t the first time ancient foods had been found. Dumplings from the Tang Dynasty (618 –907) and ancient booze have also been found in past excavations elsewhere in China. -d.d.

cHili recepTion

Indonesian media were recently up in arms claiming that diaspora Chinese were involved in a dastardly plot to introduce tainted chili crops to Indonesian land. A crop of chili infected with bacteria that are not dangerous to humans, but potentially dangerous to chili crops, was found on a farm near Jakarta. The crops were reportedly planted by Chinese, prompting claims of “biological warfare.” The people who planted the crops have been arrested, and the Chinese embassy is trying to hose down the conspiracy claims. - d.d.