Brendan O’Kane

planning

the often-overlooked Fifth Great Invention

actually it was king jie of the xia dynasty who invented being a shitty boss

I had no idea the original was by Brecht!

To say nothing of the Dirk of Deng

Outstanding!

w00t!

so who else is going to #aas2026?

Especially for pens - testing them out is about 90% of the fun.

That is a cruel but accurate thing to say about weebs

Picked up a couple KUrasly notebooks — I don’t actually need more; I just always stop by Kinokuniya whenever I have a bit of time to kill in midtown

They might just be out — spotted a couple of the large unruled/ungridded ones on a high shelf. The selection is looking generally depleted at the moment.

The Kinokuniya at Bryant Park apparently doesn’t carry Mnemosyne notebooks anymore; is2g this is the worst fuckin timeline

Do I know anyone in Istanbul who can do me a huge favour in the next few days? It relates to my mother.

(Or I guess about Shun0.25 if you're counting from the date of proclamation)

Shun0.083

yeah "America250" was probably unrealistically optimistic on my part

Yuan97
Ming276
Qing268

we need a no history month. historians deserve a break.

for some it's exquisite twinks; for some, traumatized nerds -- 5,000 years; the tradition covers a wide range

It's a while since I looked at textbooks, but basically the problem I had as a student was that once you hit intermediate level, nobody really knows what to do with you. Third-year Chinese textbooks should really just be a sheet of paper saying "I dunno, go find something that looks interesting."

Idiomatic Dialogues in the Peking Colloquial for the Use of Students : Frederic Henry Balfour : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive Book digitized by Google from the library of Harvard University and uploaded to the Internet Archive by user tpb.

I will never miss an opportunity to recommend Frederic Henry Balfour's late Qing "Idiomatic Dialogues in the Peking Colloquial for the Use of Students," particularly Dialogue XXXV, "At the Opium-Shop" (p 182)

xianxia and exquisite twinks are not my thing, but it's hard to overstate how new and great it is for Mandarin learners to be able to get their hands on literally anything that anyone could conceivably enjoy

I used to pay cash money for VCDs with pirated recordings of the CCTV Lunar New Year gala

Heya--

For those of you who are fans of Emily Wilson's outstanding translations, she's got a book out this September about the difficulties and obstacles and pleasures of translation.

www.amazon.com/Crossing-Win...

Fig. 6: Liu Sheng's double dildo and two stone eggs. The tomb of prince... Download scientific diagram | Liu Sheng's double dildo and two stone eggs. The tomb of prince LIU Sheng 劉勝 (ob. ca. 113 BCE, Han) two stone eggs were found. These could have been used to train these m...

“purpose uncertain”

18 U.S. Code § 2441(a)

also the weirdest-looking kitchen implements I can find, with labels attached saying "nonspecific ritual function"

And maybe even for the same reasons - Google Translate sometimes makes mistakes that indicate that it's using English internally somehow: ask it to translate Japanese 鹤/crane into Mandarin and you'll get 起重机, which is the wrong kind of crane, instead of the right answer, which is 鹤.