ZDL

Pick up a new language. A whole language in the course of a normal hospital stage is not really plausible, so narrow the goals. Like only learn how to swear in another language, say. Or learn how to say all the sexual acts you can think of in another language fluently.

Pick up a solo RPG and start playing when you get bored.

Edit Thanks for the report @lolola@lemmy.blahaj.zone I tried not to frame this in a controversial manner.

Dude! If anything were to show that this post was done in bad faith, doing what you just did was beyond the pale in proving it!

I'm with you on Shogi. I find that it's on the least-elegant side of the chess spectrum and I just never managed to internalize the rules. I've tried it a few times, but I return to Xiangqi as a good, fast-moving game (that I completely and utterly suck at … but enjoy to pieces nonetheless).

A friend has an eastern European neighbor move in. He says he’s glad they are that instead of American white.

Have you ever been in a gathering with just plain, white-as-in-bread Americans (especially the middle class on up, but not exclusively so)? They are boring as all fuck! They eat boring food, have boring conversations and are in general just tedious to be around when that's all that's present. (Part of this is, naturally, contempt for the familiar, but the other part is that yes they really are that boring!).

I'd much rather live in a neighbourhood that has a dozen different cultures (note: I'm not saying "races" here because "races" are nonsense) than a bunch of middle-class, white-as-in-bread Americans. So if I'm living in a neighbourhood that is mostly just plain-as-pancakes (minus the syrup) white folk, I'll celebrate an Eastern European family moving in too!

Feeling they are individually responsible for what their ancestors and/or rich and politically affluent white people did in the past.

If they genuinely feel individually responsible, that's just idiocy. The kind of idiocy that the privileged can express because there's no real cost to them, in fact.

If they are, however, just acknowledging that they have privilege based on their artificial elevation over others (c.f. "redlining") through systematic racism, and you're interpreting this as feeling individually responsible, you likely need to have an awareness adjustment.

Acting as if white people anything is bad.

This is just stupid with no qualifiers like the previous one.

Making jokes at their own expense but won’t dare say the same thing to another ethnicity.

Well fucking duh! Self-aware, self-directed humour is the high road. Punching down on someone else for their differences is the low road. (Punching up is the middle road.) I'll take it from my angle:

• German jokes: I'm half-German ethnically, and spent some of the most important formative years of my life living in Germany. When I'm making jokes about Germans, it comes from an informed position with at least a degree of sympathy for the targets of my jokes. When some American dude from the middle of Montana does the same, they come at it from a position of ignorance and stereotype that is usually a) ignorant, and b) hostile, rather than sympathetic.

• Chinese jokes: Where Americans (not of German descent, and even many who are) make German jokes have at least some cultural warrants in common, there are almost zero cultural warrants in common with Chinese people. White Americans are so incredibly ignorant of Chinese culture, society, behaviour, and beliefs that they think "Ching Chong" sounds like Chinese (protip: not even fucking close!) and they think "Confucius say" jokes¹ are a) plausibly real, and b) funny (protip: neither is true). Use either of these in my presence and you're going to get the stink-eye and a confrontation you will not enjoy. Yet ... I can tell jokes about Chinese people because, again, I'm ethnically half-Chinese, I've lived in China for almost a quarter of a century now, and my jokes will actually a) be based on knowledge, and b) be based on sympathetic sharing of values while poking fun at idiosyncrasies.

• Jokes about white folk: Here's where you're going to probably find it "unfair", but the fact is that white folk are the dominant folk in Europe and North America. All y'all's culture is everywhere, overriding everybody else's. And all y'all're the culture with the greatest proportion of money. And here's the thing: minorities punching up is fine. Indeed laudable. Every king needs his jester to prick his ego and make fun of his excesses. The jester making fun of the king is laudable and brave. The king beating down the jester is not. So like it or not, not only is it bad for white folk to be making fun of minorities, it's cowardly. And the reverse, however, is fine (and brave). I already know from the nature of your question that you're absolutely going to hate that I said that, but it's true nonetheless. Punching down is mean-spirited. Punching up is not.

¹ Consider how typical Americans would react to someone making "Yeshua ben Yusuf" jokes about Christ's purported sayings that are as offensive as these "Confucius say" jokes are. Now flip the script. Yeah. That.

Methings someone doesn't understand what "evidence" and "sources" are.

As an alternative, for training up, you can print up circular labels of the appropriate size with the Chinese characters and their English meanings and stick them on the bottom of the playing pieces. Just play with the pieces upside-down until you're used to the characters.

I have no idea. Can't be much older than 5, though.

BTW, the kid knows the game very well. He kicked the adult's ass. Almost casually. (There were only two short points where he paused to think when playing.)

象棋 is in the family of Chess games, but it is a different game, yes, like Japan's Shogi. If you have any chess skills they'll translate well to this game, though. There's a Chess Variants page summary available that goes into better detail. In brief, though, the differences include:

1. The "palace" in the centre of each side. The general and his advisors/guards are only permitted to move in that space: the advisors one space along the diagonals only, the general one space orthogonally only.
2. Generals are not allowed to be in uninterrupted line of sight across the board. (A common pinning tactic uses this rule.)
3. The elephant/ministers move diagonally two spaces, can be blocked, and cannot cross the "river" in the middle of the board. (This means they can only inhabit 7 places on the board, yet despite their rigidity knowing how to use them is incredibly important to play.)
4. The horses move like knights in Chess, but unlike knights they can be blocked: they do not jump.
5. The chariots are identical in movement and capture to the rooks of Chess.
6. The cannons are ... the things that will screw you up the most. They're very subtle pieces. They move like chariots, but they capture by jumping a single piece (either side's) to take a single piece on the other side of the jump. They must have precisely one piece between them and the target to capture it.
7. The soldiers (what you called pawns) move forward one space when on their side of the river. Once they cross the river they can move one space forward, or to the left and right. They capture as they move.
8. The game has the same number of pieces as Chess, but the board is larger (90 spaces instead of 64) meaning games tend to be more dynamic and free-flowing than Chess games.

Read the Chess Variants page for more detailed rules. It's actually quite a fun game once you get used to reading the characters on the pieces.

Xiangqi, a.k.a. Chinese Chess.

I get this impression that people in the USA simply don't comprehend how much work and money is going to be needed to "return manufacturing to America".

Perhaps this video will help: https://peertube.mesnumeriques.fr/w/4ukCr36qciYWFVGpCVPsQM

It is not merely labour costs that make production in China better for most companies. It's the flexibility that Chinese businesses show as well.