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Pandaren names and how to create one for roleplay
All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players. In World of Warcraft, that player is you! Each week, Anne Stickney brings you All the World's a Stage with helpful hints, tips and tricks on the art of roleplay in WoW. One of the hardest, most difficult things to do when you're creating a roleplay character is coming up with a name for your character. This isn't necessarily because it's difficult to come up with a name; it has far more to do with coming up with a name that isn't taken already. Let's face it, World of Warcraft has been around for so many years now that almost every iteration of every name out there has been used in one form or another. Mists of Pandaria is introducing the pandaren as the new player race. Unlike every other new race that came before, the pandaren are available to both factions, which means that finding the perfect pandaren name is going to be even trickier than usual. Pandaren names are filled with just as much tradition and history as pandaren culture, which makes names a little easier to muddle out.
Google to flag 'censored' searches for Chinese users (video)
Google is announcing that it's going to place a flag on contentious search terms for users in mainland China. Mountain View's Alan Eustace euphemistically described how some searches break a connection to the service, leading to users being frozen out for around a minute each time. He theatrically added that the company has checked its servers several times and found no error, so whatever issue causes these outages must be external. Whenever a term is typed that is likely to cause an "outage," the error message in the picture above will appear, with a suggestion to search for something else, or use Pinyin to search for a term where contentious keywords appear inside otherwise natural searches.
Mists of Pandaria beta: A guide to pandaren pronunciation
Mists of Pandaria brings us an all-new continent with a ton of brand-new races, quests, storylines, and characters. Along with those characters comes a whole host of names that look a lot easier to pronounce than they actually are. With names commonly found in the troll race, it's a simple matter of navigating your way around all of the apostrophes. Old Gods, for the most part, sound just like they are spelled. But with the names you find in Mists, there's an actual precedent for pronunciation, and most words definitely don't sound like they look. Simon, one of our readers who also happens to be fluent in Chinese, took some time out of his busy day to drop an email in my inbox detailing just a few of the Chinese words, their meaning, and their actual pronunciations. According to Simon, many of the names you'll encounter in Mists are actually written using the standard PinYin system, which, when accurate, is usually pronounced differently than how it looks.
