zeerphling

Are you familiar with Tamriel Rebuilt? The team has been adding content to the mainland of Morrowind for 20 years. They’re technically not finished, but there’s plenty to do.

There’s also Project: Tamriel with Skyrim: Home of the Nords and Province: Cyrodiil. There’s not as much content as Tamriel Rebuilt, but all are being actively worked on.

Just to add a little more context to the public/private school divide in China.

1. Private schools are generally run separate from Gao Kao training in public schools. That is, a student in a private school is usually studying to go to a university outside China. There are some exceptions like the universities that have joint partnerships with Anglosphere universities, like Duke Kunshan, NYU Shanghai, and Xi’an Jiaotong Liverpool, that mainland students can enter with or without Gao Kao scores.

1a. There are also private schools that are inside public schools that give the students both a graduation certificate from a local public high school and a more international education in programs like the IB, A-levels (Cambridge, Oxford, Edexcel, etc.), AP, among other bespoke curriculums.

2. A student who does not complete the Gao Kao is not eligible to work for the government. There is some sort of stamp that the students get upon graduation from public schools that is needed for their civil service application. If you don’t do the Gao Kao, you can’t get the stamp.

2a. In order to be eligible for the Gao Kao, the student must have also passed the Zhong Kao (The public high school entrance exam)

3. While the tuition for university may seem like not much to a person used to the costs in the west, it can be burdensome to many locals in the PRC. Here’s a few (articles in Chinese) examples of students losing all their tuition, sometimes leading to unfortunate results.

4. There are also schools that students without a local Hukou (household registration) can enter, but I’m not familiar with that side of education.

4a. A parent can get a new Hukou for their child by buying an apartment in a new city, and other options depending on the municipality.

4b. There is talk of some Hukou reforms in large east-coast cities, but we’ll have to wait and see what exactly changes

The difference between it being a rule and an exception depends on which side of the North/South dividing line a speaker is from. Generally, people from south and south-east of the Yangtze river speak languages whose most recent common ancestor is Middle Chinese and not Mandarin.

Here’s a map of the Sinitic languages and a map of the varieties of Mandarin.

Just to add some more info from a nearby city to Shanghai. In Suzhou, schools run programmes for the preservation of the topolect, they also have 苏州话 in some of the busses that go around the city centre. There’s even a Wu language section in the Suzhou library. Of course, with anything in the PRC every municipality will be different, but at least there is some preservation going on.

Though, according to this source (in Chinese) from 2022 only 2.2% of 6 - 20 year-olds can use 苏州话 proficiently.

The author does say they are unclear about how that data was gathered, so it could just be a limited amount of people from the Suzhou area gave a response. Still, from personal experience I don’t think it’s that low, as I’ve had several students (and some colleagues, though that would break the 6 - 20 year-old limit) claim that they spoke 苏州话 with their parents or grandparents.

I did have a fun conversation the other day about racism in the US with a student, but such topics really only come up in one-on-one discussions. And they don’t have time for many of those throughout the year.

True, true. I shouldn’t worry about most of them. Perhaps the students are genuinely inoculated against such stupidity.

Sure. A little background first, my students are relatively well-off and mostly did not succeed during their time in compulsory education. So, they decided to study outside the PRC, mostly because they had a small chance of making it into the better domestic universities.

Most students, at least at this school, go to either the UK or Australia. Though a few occasionally do go to Canada or the US. Of course, I don’t feel comfortable actively dissuading the students from going (they get enough pressure from parents and other staff at the school), but sometimes I wonder if I should.

Anyway, looking at comments that infantalises an entire group of people just because they were born on a different piece of dirt, not to mention downright genocidal rhetoric, makes me think that students from the PRC isolating themselves from that sort of brain rot is a successful self-preservation technique.

Which, while answering the question of “why do Chinese students seem to only stick together.” It feels like people who would comment in such a provocative way are just minutes from doing actual bodily harm to others.

But maybe I’m over thinking it and these folks have little or no chance of coming into contact with PRC citizens.

People like those in the comments are why I worry about my students from the PRC who want to study in the imperial core.

That’s true, I guess I’ve just played enough similar games where I could say “oh, this feels like an important choice, I better do it.” And then my character became a lich.

But I can definitely see where you’re coming from for a certain other path where there are quite a lot of hoops to go through.

And I think the game is supposed to have replayability though those paths… but then they put all the content with the paths they think players will be drawn to. Not necessarily the most fun to play. Like, I picked Lich to resurrect certain dead characters, but there’s no interaction with them beyond “go home” and “come with me”.

Talking about the second game makes me want to replay Kingmaker. I actually liked the party members in that game.

Is it that odd to like the first one and not the second? I played the entirety of the second one waiting for some interesting choices, the few interactions I enjoyed were with the evil-aligned companions (which is not really enough to warrant a full playthrough). The whole premise of the adventure path is underwhelming, really. Instead of doing something interesting like dethroning the monarchy, you get to fight demons for a feckless leader.

Some of the mechanics were improved, and I did like the mythic paths, but it felt like there was only one interesting chapter (the one where you travel to the demon city), even if it was annoying to navigate.