In terms of actual acupuncture, i went with the common trope for cultivation stories. You can survive being disemboweled and lose 80% of your total blood volume, but as long as your qi flow and meridians are fine you can just sleep it off.

Not exactly the most realistic of treatments, but hey, we've got fireballs and flying swords too.

What, you didn't know? Cultivation increases your blood total so you can have splatter-ier fights!

Oh, i know.

I mean, acupuncture is a form of healing that has you stabbing more holes into an injured person to make them better.

Just taking a moment here to hope nobody in the group lives too close to the heated spots on the map in the current interesting times.

Oh, i'm just 900 kilometers away :)

hmm, this one doesn't translate well from my native languague, but I hope you enjoy reading this little bit as much as I did writing it :)

Spring, shyly,
spreading sleepy wings-
gentlest forest's breath,
naked sprites' glee.

Thanks for sharing with us!

Pretty cool, thanks for sharing!

I'll try to get a post going as soon as I get home with some semblance of energy left.
I'm not going to say that this country's fiscal IT infrastructure has a single point of failure, that it failed and that now it's my problem.
But it failed. And now it's my problem x.x

That is super crappy. I'm sorry you have to go through that.

Hey, you know the old saying: "To make mistakes is human, but to really mess things up you need a computer."

Joking aside however, here's to hoping it's an easy fix.

systems with a single point of failure are fun! :D

It'll be a fun story, moreso if it involves debugging COBOL programs written 40ish years ago (happened to a friend of a friend a in an Austrian bank... )

and hey, just last year I had to port some Deplhi I wrote in 2001 into JS so "it could run on mobile phones".

Fortunately it's only tangentially my problem, I don't need to FIX it.
I only need to apply the provided workaround to a few hundred of our own customers.

...that hardly sounds better, does it?

May Murphy be with you. :D

In reply to Laozi (msg # 118):

Hey, don't underestimate the human factor!

Story from several decades ago. My uncle used to be a programmer (he's retired now), and he and his team were working on a project for IBM. It was around Xmas, so someone decided to send out a Merry Christmas email to everyone.

Thing is, he messed up.

Apparently, he had added a bit of code that set it up in such a way that everyone opening the email would automatically send out a Merry Christmas to all THEIR contacts as well. And those contacts would send it to their contacts. Eventually, peoples inboxes would get clogged by the constant avalanche of Merry Christmas emails, and it actually shut down the IBM network. They went around calling every employee by phone and telex to not open any of those emails.

Anyhow, after a week or two of running scripts that automatically deleted the Merry Christmas emails, they went and backtracked to see which was the first email sent. They eventually tracked the guy down, but didn't press charges i believe since it had been unintentional. Everyone at IBM got a few weeks paid leave though, since no one could actually work on anything with the system down -- my uncle included.

I have to know, is Chiasa bad at reading people or intentionally antagonizing the righteous fellow?

She's trying to win his trust actually.

Think of it as "I am righteous therefore i cannot not bring this up". That Yin is (understandably) upset at this revelation is regrettable, but i am honor bound to point this out as remaining silent would only benefit the demonic.

That she can make a play that may possibly end up with Elders of a high ranking Clan owe her a favor is entirely coincidental, i assure you. :P

Or... Hear me out... They execute her as a heretic because they don't want an inconvenient truth to get in the way of their corrupt power schemes.

But maybe they are good guys. Yeah, it could never end poorly.

Nope, if they were they would have altered the technique before distributing it so the true version would be known only to them to begin with.

I think the most danger i'll be in is trying to tell Clan Elders that i needed less than a week to figure out they fucked up, while trying to avoid hurting their pride.

Current elders might be late and not have questioned it when they learned. They might still assume it is righteous. But they really couldn't afford word to get around unless they want to change sect fundamentally.

What if a child tells you that your prized inheritence is evil? You won't take the child seriously, right?

While face is a serious concern in chinese culture, elders are discouraged from bullying juniors. Else every cultivation novel would be really short :D

True. But if I KNOW it is evil and want to save face... I am the kind of villain that makes short stories that don't make people happy.

I think we are all glad Laozi isn't that kind of person!

I try to keep stories to only having one or two of those. Keeps life interesting, they can't be super far up the power chain though or have to already be so high up they don't notice most people anymore.
This message was last edited by the player at 18:08, Wed 13 Apr 2022.

A quick reminder that Im actually still alive.
Code must be delivered in a working state Friday.
Alpha testing started today.
I have more coffee than blood in my body.

Oof, best wishes buddy! Ya got this.

In reply to Zhu Wenlong (msg # 129):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJvEIjRBSDA