Not everyone can feasibly do this, you need to speak mandarin + read/write chinese, legally be able to work, and have some way to deal with the gfw. Also tap water may not be drinkable but thats more of a nuisance since you can filter/boil it.

Also idk what the article is talking about with flying delivery drones and self driving cars in shenzhen, if you order meituan delivery its probably gonna be delivered by a gig worker on a scooter cuz thats all young people can get employed as these days. Delivery is insanely cheap and can't possibly pay much, but also cost of living is relatively low, but still shenzhen is on the expensive end as far as living in china goes.

Finally paying for everything via alipay/wechat and visiting everywhere with biometrics is yet another convenience/privacy tradeoff. Visit china on a 10 year tourist visa, everywhere you go by train, every tourist attraction or national park you visit, every digital payment, is all linked to your passport. Equivalent for chinese citizens would be the national id card/number. China more or less skipped the credit card adoption phase afaik. Not that places won't take cash but it's less common especially in cities.

China is not a magical land where everything is perfect and futuristic. It's a big country with a lot of people in many, many big cities that operates on totally different cultural systems. It is affordable from the perspective of a tourist who earns USD/Euro etc.

Source: I spent a month there in 2025

I thought the vegas "loop" was a pathetic and useless project that transports basically no one at speeds of 15 mph, but thanks to this article I now know that it is also a scourge on the environment of planet earth due to the pollutants added during its construction! Which I suppose doesn't put it too far off most of the things in the las vegas strip. But it's seriously pathetic, they dig 1 tunnel from point A to point B and have a driver drive a tesla to transport people from A to B and B to A. The tunnel is only wide enough for traffic in one direction BTW so if people are waiting on either side, they have to wait for the 1 car to finish its trip.

You can tell by the direction it's written, like つ=ツ because the strokes go horizontally left to right like the hiragana, while し=シ because the strokes go down vertically first. If that makes sense

1 billion means you only earned the first score extend right? I'm very impressed you survived to stage 5 yet didn't score even close to the 2nd score extend. I think if you figure out how to do a little scoring in the first 2 stages the game will really come alive and you might also pocket the extend at 10billion sometime in stage 4 or so. You clearly have the skills to dodge/bomb/hyper when necessary.

I only played black label (steam version and also an arcade near me has a DFKBL pcb) but the second score extend is basically mandatory for me to get to the end of stage 4 or have a chance of going to stage 5. And before that, getting the first score extend would get me to the hidden extra life in stage 3 etc. Scoring is good for survival and I think it's fun to play for score even at the level where we can't currently 1cc. Gives a goal/benchmark for how I'm playing

(cont.) Guild wars 2 is another mmo that is worth trying to see if you like the feel of the action combat. You can again play a whole lot free, but you do have to pay if you want the expansion content (which i feel is kind of diabolical to lock mounts behind max level expansion content). I also do not like that you can buy in game currency with real money, and then buy legendary (best in slot) weapons off the trading post with in game currency.

Theres maplestory which is mainly singleplayer, just make sure you make your char on the reboot (non-p2w) servers. Scratches the itch.

Honorable mention to private/classic servers like tera classic which i've been meaning to try out. The population being tiny is the most obvious factor but it is nice that the game has been preserved at all for people to play.

Ffxiv has a lot of content available in the free trial but it is not really a "free mmorpg" since if you want to do content that released less than 6 years ago, or join/use FC guilds or linkshell chats, or trade, have any significant quantity of gil, get housing, or use player markets, then you have to buy the game and pay a subscription. Mahjong is free though and it's quite a good mahjong client.

That said, it is a good way to figure out if you like the basic gameplay systems: the UI and menus which are very customizable, controls (switch to legacy if using M&KB), tab target combat and global cooldown, main scenario questing, instanced dungeons and normal mode bosses, unlocking multiple jobs to try out.

All this with the caveat that basically all jobs at level 70 feel like an empty shell of the combat rotation of level 100, and high end content is only available and populated for the most recent patches + the 6 ultimate raids.