• 9 Posts
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Joined 2 months ago
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Cake day: June 6th, 2025

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  • I’m sure the boycott will soften somewhat after Trump leaves (presuming he isn’t made President for Life and heralding a new era in American governance) because people have short memories and will forget that almost all American officials at every level were either directly working for his platform or just sitting ineffectually at the side pretending to do anything but not really stopping it.

    But it will only soften. It will not be over. Not for most Canadians alive today. The USA poisoned its brand but good and by the time Trump has stopped raging like a bull in a china shop, Canadians will have found new favourite brands and suppliers and such and American brands will be dead anyway.

    Because once I find something I like, why would I go back just because the old brand says “but we’ve chaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaanged!”


  • Ursula K. LeGuin’s Always Coming Home is an intriguing approach to novel writing. Some can’t get into it because it looks more like an ethnologist’s report, but there is a story there (and I don’t mean the segments with Stone Telling: the entire novel has a story that rewards those who pay attention).



  • I think of the major awards the one that matches my tastes best (and still only at an about 25% hit rate) is the Nobel Prize. After the various scandals and fiascos of Worldcon (especially the Chengdu fiasco) I will not ever trust the Hugos ever again (and even before that they maybe had a hit rate of about 10%).

    I’m with some of the other posters I’ve read here, though. In general I think industry awards are essentially self-love in the grotty sense of the term.




  • The repetition between chapters happens because the storyteller of a given story doesn’t know if you know the origin story or not. (It’s like how every damned Superman or Spider-Man or whatever movie always has to show how Superman/Spider-Man came to be.) Within chapters it could be part of an oral recitation thing with the repetitions being vestigial choruses. There is a lot of scholarship around this novel, and I’m not really deeply involved in any of it. I’m a situation- and opportunity-driven dabbler.


  • It’s a little bit out of date naturally (1300 years will do that to you), but it’s actually kind of amazing how relevant it still is today. It doesn’t have information on all the different varieties of tea available today (the 2011-published tome The Classic of Chinese Tea which is increasingly the standard textbook for tea production in China corrects this), but what it does mention is still here today processed very much in similar fashions (albeit with upgrades in the equipment for picking it).

    It would be a bit of a slog to read (because of some unfamiliar terminology you’d have to check up in the appendices) were it not so short. My trilingual edition is a small hardback book of 150 pages (including some opening pages with pretty pictures, two introductions, a preface, two appendices and a references list). About half that is the English text, so you’re looking at reading about 75 pages. I think you could browse it quite successfully over a weekend without strain.


  • The repetition is there because these are primarily oral tales that have been barely edited into something that almost, but not quite, has a coherent narrative.

    The tales within Journey to the West come from a very wide period of historical storytelling and are in a wide variety of storytelling traditions. There’s very little consistency from tale to tale, and any overarching theme was added much later in forming the “novel”. (It’s a “novel” in the same way that Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles is a novel, right down to inconsistencies from member story to story.)




  • Individual movies are not useful data. Superman as a concept is very American and has little appeal outside of the Americas and almost no appeal in Asia. For example a search on Taobao for " 超人" (Superman’s name in Chinese) has about 8 entries for electric razors to each entry for something related to Superman. Even Aquaman is more popular: a search for 海王侠 provides a listing where about 90% of the entries are related to the comic character, despite 海王 being a very popular brand of health supplements and Taobao’s search being infamous for throwing anything at you that has even one of the characters you have in your search.

    And Spider-Man? Yeah. A search on 蜘蛛侠 gives us so many genuine Spider-Man entries, plus a few that are kinda/sorta related (read: weird knock-offs) that you won’t have any problem finding what you want.

    So Superman flopped in China (4th at the box office for foreign films) not because of people hating the USA but rather because the character simply doesn’t resonate with the local populace. I suspect we can find the same in Korea and Japan.