This is depressing to read. If this is the closest you can come to civil discourse, then don't bother.
Hey, WaveMaster. I'm terribly sorry to hear about your depression, and while this is normally not the place to go about it, I'll try to cheer you up by letting you know there are far more depressing things out there other than the truth. For example, hunger in Africa, Mickey Rourke's current appearance, and comments such as this
and I don't enjoy spending my time in a deeply flawed, imbalanced game, no matter how popular it is elsewhere.
Fore more information on depression and Zung Jung (Zung and depression seem to share a close relationship), please refer to this link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zung_Self- ... sion_Scale
And since you did take your time to increase your post count by 1, while only using 2 sentences, I'll show you I value your time and investment into this discussion by providing you of a more civil post.
I would like to live in an universe where it is the games that are flowed and not the player; I bet it would probably be a lot less "depressing" and more "civil" place to leave in. In such universe, I could play the guitar as terrible as I wanted, then throw it away, call it "flawed" and immediately proceed to tell everyone about how much better and more balanced the piano is, and finally I could just disagree in forums with everyone and anyone who states otherwise. When I was 10, I wanted a guitar more than anything in the world (except for a real dinosaur). However, my arms were too short, my fingers too weak and the fact that I kept neurotically biting my nails all the way to my finger didn't help much either. You could say having T-Rex arms was cool, because I also liked dinosaurs, but I had to forget about playing the guitar until I turned 16 and finally bought one for myself. The strings seemed old and sounded terrible. Nevertheless, there I sat, and I sat there, just playing and playing for hours and hours, making horrible noises just because I had the toy I so much longed for and now my arms and fingers were finally of the proper length and strength respectively. If I had given up on guitar earlier, I wouldn't have gotten to enjoy all those out-of-tune melodies I performed... and I also wouldn't have been kicked out of several apartments because of the annoying noise either. I think that's when my depression started, but it's hard to say. It probably started when I was born and I realized I wasn't born a dinosaur.
I have to admit, though, that a part of me would like to use Zung Jung as a tool to teach mahjong. The newer players at our club keep committing a huge amount of chonbo only because while they are good-willed enough to complete four mentsu and a pair, they're just not persistent enough to remember that they need to have at least one yaku to win the hand. Now, if we were playing Zung Jung, this would allow them to earn a positive income instead of causing them to lose 8000 (or 12000) points out of a common beginner's mistake, and they would come out ahead instead of behind, and then rejoice. That way we could spend more time sharing laughter, and less time throwing tiles and point sticks at each other in the face, while we poke each other's legs with sharp knives under the table. I can imagine other uses. Whenever one of the slightly more advanced players would throw away a workable MenPin 1shanten by systematically discarding two other suits they "don't like," proceeding to call all tiles in the third suit for a hon itsu nomi hand, instead of scolding them by striking them on the thighs with my 40cms ruler as usual, I could just pat them in the shoulder and say that it's not their fault - they're just better off playing a more balanced scoring system. This would probably help, or at least reduce the amount of lawsuits against me because of "physical assaults with possible sexual harassment." In any case, either of those things are positive and have my approval.
Nonetheless, while that part of me wants to use ZJ for that purpose, the other, larger and more realistic part of myself reminds me that it's not necessary to teach ping-pong first in order to teach tennis. After that, I normally get into a huge depression because of how uncivil, or at least unpractical, I am. Then I proceed to haunt internet forums to pass this depression on to others. I see you might have seen yourself reflected in some of those comments and maybe took offense. For this, I apologize with you, and I hope we can still be friends like all these years, maybe even closer than before.
I wish I could be less depressing, and a lot more civil. Apparently that would involve skipping to only certain parts of a post, replying only to that part, then ignoring the rest while hardly making a contribution to the discursive activity itself.
One time I tried being more civil and animistic, even dressed up as a clown and told everyone around me about the joys of love, rainbows and how we're all beautiful and should never contradict others. Unluckily enough, everyone at that funeral didn't quite like my disposition. But don't blame me, it was a highly unbalanced and flawed event, no matter how popular they are elsewhere.