Web Excursions 2022-07-24
Chinese Gamers Are Using a Steam Wallpaper App to Get Porn Past the Censors
The epiphany will come when you begin to read Wallpaper Engine’s many reviews.
More than 200,000 of them are written in Chinese, stretching from 2016 to 2022.
And these reviews almost all talk about one thing: porn.
Or more specifically, about using the software as a cloud drive and a video player for exchanging adult-only content.
It’s impossible to know exactly how many of Wallpaper Engine’s users are from China,
but evidence suggests that at least 40% of them are Chinese, almost twice Steam’s Chinese user percentage.
Among the nearly half a million Steam reviews of Wallpaper Engine,
40% were written by someone whose default language was simplified Chinese,
compared with English at 28%.
More recent reviews follow the same trend: during the first seven days of July,
the software received 2,907 Steam reviews, and
MIT Technology Review has found that 40% of those were written either in simplified Chinese or by someone with a simplified Chinese username.
(Language is a common proxy for Steam users’ geographical distribution, which is hard to collect on Steam.)
Meanwhile, only 24.75% of total Steam users set their default language as simplified Chinese, according to Steam’s latest sampling survey, from June 2022.
A different stat by Steam suggests that 21% of overall traffic came from China in the seven days before the publication of this story.
Compare this with 40%, and it’s clear that Chinese users are overrepresented in Wallpaper Engine’s user base.
The developers, who keep a relatively low profile online, likely know how their software is being used thousands of miles away.
When Kristjan Skutta, one of the main developers, was invited to China in 2019 to attend an event,
Chinese media asked what he thought about the fact that the app was being used to watch certain types of videos.
“What’s wrong with that? Wallpaper Engine is only a framework. No matter what you upload to it—even those crazy videos—I don’t think there’s any problem”
With almost all international social media platforms now unavailable in China, Steam has become one of the only places where some Chinese people, at least gamers, can communicate directly with overseas communities.
Teens Are Rewriting What Is Possible in the World of Competitive Tetris
In the past four years, what once seemed an impossibility has become the norm in competitive classic Tetris.
In the 1989 NES version of Tetris, which is still standard at competitive tournaments, players make it well into level 30 and beyond.
This new generation of talent, made up of mostly teenagers, has not only breathed new life into a 30-year-old game, but also completely upended expectations of what’s possible within it.
From the beginning, competitive players of classic Tetris tried to push the game past what its developers imagined possible.
The first frontier of competitive Tetris was the maxout, when the score was pushed past 999,999 and the game would no longer show an accurate score.
Because playing in level 29 and beyond was out of the question, players aimed to break 1 million before the game would inevitably beat them.
This meant maintaining “maxout pace” where players would complete enough “Tetrises” (when a player drops a straight I-block vertically, clearing four lines simultaneously and earning more points than single line clears) before the kill screen.
Over the first eight years of CTWC, maxing out before level 29 shifted from being an impossible frontier to a badge of honor for the game’s elite.
It was still a notable accomplishment until the scene began to shift in 2018,
when Joseph Saelee, a then-16-year-old from Visalia, California, began dismantling records and set the stage for a new generation’s influence on the game.
He survived past the game’s kill screen, becoming the first player to make it to level 31 and 32 — then 33 through 35.
No other player had even made it past level 30, not even seven-time champion Neubauer.
One of the reasons Saelee posted such high scores was his play style.
Almost all players at the time maneuvered pieces into place by holding the directional keys down on the retro NES controllers.
Instead of opting for this method, Saelee learned to “hypertap” from another player named Koji “Koryan” Nishio.
Saelee learned to flex his arm and manually press the directional buttons more quickly than the classic game would automatically shift the pieces,
enabling him to react faster at the game’s highest speeds, even in level 29 and beyond.
By the time the 2020 CTWC rolled around, the world had changed, and so had the competitive Tetris scene.
No longer held in Portland because of the COVID-19 pandemic, CTWC shifted online.
Suddenly, Tetris’ top players weren’t in their 30s and 40s;
they were in their teens
The average age of the 2020 CTWC’s top eight players was 17 years old.
The youngest player was 13-year-old Michael “Dog” Artiaga,
“We used to ask players for their job title to put on their bio, but now everyone is a student, it’s a worthless question now.”
These new, young players had novel ideas for how to play classic Tetris more efficiently.
Before the 2020 CTWC, Christopher “Cheez” Martinez told Saelee that he had something in the works.
It was a new method of playing classic Tetris that he called “rolling.”
Instead of hypertapping, which was rather difficult to learn and punishing on the body,
Martinez’s new method of rolling involved drumming his fingers on the back of the NES controller,
putting pressure on the buttons on the other side.
Rolling has resulted in another wave of shattered records.
In the 2021 CTWC semifinal match between Saelee and Jacob “Huffulufugus” Huff, Huff had committed to rolling and pushed Saelee to the limit, breaking the record for the highest scoring competitive match.
Saelee was averaging scores above one million, but it wasn’t enough;
Huff was able to play well past the kill screen, once to level 36 and once to level 40, and catch up to him, no matter how high Saelee had scored.
Rolling has taken over the Tetris world.
Most of the top 8 from the 2021 CTWC have switched to rolling in some capacity over the past year in time for the 2022 CTWC
In a monthly Tetris competition this past May, Artiaga won a match that broke the world record for highest combined score in a single game, highest losing score (1.5 million), and highest winning score (2.1 million).
Artiaga reached level 58, a full 29 levels after the game’s kill screen.
In February, another player was able to get to level 138 in noncompetitive play by rolling on the PAL version of Tetris, which is roughly 17% slower than the competitive standard NTSC version.
At such a high level, the game glitched and started to read random data to fill the color palettes of the Tetris blocks.
There were many reasons that young players had gotten so good at the game so quickly.
There was Neubauer’s Tetris 101 video where he explained techniques and strategies that were key to competitive Tetris.
There was Koryan’s willingness to share his method of hypertapping that invited so many others to learn.
The younger players got to skip all of the development of those methods and build on them, instead of struggling from the ground up.
The warmth of the community that Neubauer inspired came to the fore when Neubauer, the undisputed greatest-of-all-time Tetris player, died suddenly in January 2021 at the age of 39.
Reeling, the community lost its leader but rallied around his family and changed the 2021 CTWC trophy to a J-piece in his name and honor.
His competitive excellence was just the surface of his contribution.
Clemente recalled how Neubauer’s character set the tone for how competitors treated each other.
This past April, a player posted the current world record score of 3.7 million and reached level 95.
After an amount of shock at the ludicrous achievement, he picked up the camera to focus on his tube TV as he manually typed in Jonas’ name on the 8-bit game and dedicated the score to him. The current high score in Tetris is over triple what Neubauer and other older players even imagined possible just a few years ago.
This new generation has broken every record that the older Tetris generation set, but they recognize they couldn’t have gotten here without those who came before them.
Why Storytelling Is Part of Being a Good Doctor
A doctor’s workload tends to crowd out everything but the most immediate concerns. But, as the years pass, the things you’ve pushed to the back of your mind start to pile up, demanding to be addressed. For two decades, I had seen my patients and their loved ones face some of life’s most uncertain moments, and I now felt driven to bear witness to their stories.
I realized that many of the problems with my draft reflected the conditioning that occurs during medical training. I had used technical jargon, as if communicating with colleagues, rather than addressing a general reader. And I had removed myself from the stories, a result of the psychological distancing needed to remain steady while helping a patient coping with a life-threatening disease. Finally, I’d focussed on the clinical details of the cases, instead of exploring patients’ emotional and spiritual dilemmas—the very thing that had moved me to write in the first place.
appreciate how they used their individual perspectives and styles to illuminate the experiences of those struggling with illness. They made their own reactions part of the story and, in doing so, immersed the reader in a fundamental struggle of the profession: balancing the ego required to take responsibility for another person’s life with the humility to acknowledge our capacity for catastrophic error.
Jay Wellons’s vivid mid-career memoir, “All That Moves Us” (Random House). Wellons is the chief of pediatric neurosurgery at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center, in Nashville,
You peer forward into the eyepieces, and your gaze is directed straight down onto the surface of the brain, to a scene the likes of which only few have encountered, initially as alien as the moonscape must have been to its early visitors. Except instead of desolate grayness all around, the brain’s surface is bursting with color and light, with dimension and depth. It takes a moment for your eyes to adjust to the sudden brightness.
For parents, merely hearing him introduce himself as a pediatric neurosurgeon can be traumatic. (“As I did, his chin dropped to his chest,” Wellons writes of one father.) He recalls acquaintances who implored him to avoid this line of work, citing stereotypes of neurosurgeons as grouchy, egotistical workaholics whose patients usually die
“The tissue was entirely different at twenty-three weeks of gestation, akin to sewing wet tissue paper. The slightest wrong move would tear the fragile skin.”
In Richard Selzer’s short story “Imelda,” an American plastic surgeon named Hugh Franciscus, a cold and imperious perfectionist, goes on a charity mission to Honduras. There he prepares to operate on a young girl, Imelda, with a cleft palate. But Imelda suffers a complication from anesthesia, dying before Franciscus even makes an incision. That night, he sneaks into the hospital morgue and performs the planned surgery on Imelda’s corpse, so that her mother can bury a repaired child. He has saved face, in more ways than one, but he is shattered by the experience, unable to recover from an imperfect outcome.
a case in which he had to operate on a pair of conjoined twins, who were connected at the back of the head and had been born very prematurely
suddenly, more than three hours into the operation, heavy bleeding issues from deep within the two brains. Attempts to stanch the flow don’t work, and Wellons finds himself “cutting the joined skull with scissors, all hope of delicacy abandoned, trying to get them separated so that my partner and I could each take one and stop the bleeding.” There is a moment of relief when the bleeding stops, then a terrible realization:
It stopped because all bleeding stops. They had both died, and I remember that I couldn’t see to sew and tears were falling on the twin in front of me. I was sewing them up so that the parents could at least hold their babies one time, separated. We should have sacrificed the one for the other but we went for both and they were both gone and I still remember standing there unable to see.
The young woman’s mother anxiously tells him that her daughter, Liza, suffers from heart palpitations, but when he examines the patient little seems wrong. During his stay, he comes to attribute her misery to the exploitative atmosphere of the factory and the idleness of capitalism’s rentier class. Furthermore, he senses that she knows this. “You in the position of a factory owner and a wealthy heiress are dissatisfied,” he tells her. “That, of course, is better than if you were satisfied, slept soundly, and thought everything was satisfactory. Your sleeplessness does you credit.”
the chapter’s title, “GSW to head,” is forceful precisely because this abbreviation for a gunshot wound is so common in emergency medicine.
When Wellons recalls being unable, early in his career, to save a young man struck by “a stray falling bullet, fired into the sky by some excited reveler at an early-morning party,” he examines his overwhelming sense of failure, and the way a senior colleague counselled him to overcome it—first by acknowledging that the patient received the best care possible and then by focussing on his responsibility to give his next patient his full attention.
Part of being an adept physician, one senses from reading Sacks, is being an adept storyteller. This insight has developed into a discipline within medical education, “narrative medicine,” which Wellons brought to the pediatric-neurosurgery department at Vanderbilt. Raised in the Episcopal Church, he phrases its application in religious terms: “Telling stories about the things that most affect us is a redemptive act and will help us all—patient and practitioner—in the push to heal.”
the word “doctor” comes from the Latin “to teach.” By writing stories, we as doctors aim to teach others about our patients while learning about ourselves