Go read this lovely translation of a fantastic story now! Pseudo-Science Fiction Stories is such an imaginative collection. It’s a real shame Cui’s work is out of print on the mainland (and that the early 2000s editions used lousy glue are crumbling to pieces).

big news! could not be more excited to be translating《小花旦》by Wang Zhanhei 王占黑. www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/...

Old Arthur’s really having a moment. Just this week he shows up as quotesperation alongside Epictetus and Aristotle in a new Gin Lee video, 隨時隨地 www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2NC...

Hello. For @reactorsff.bsky.social I wrote about the domestic side of the Fantastic Four and their comic and television roots.

He was walking up and down the line encouraging people to ask him about the rules A woman yelled, "Can you sing us the rules?" He immediately sang, "Don't bring your firearms on the plane/There are signs everywhere that you ignooore"

Studies have found the most logical and fastest keyboard layout is not between key orders like qwerty and dvorak, but one that prioritises the size of keys depending on the frequency of those letters in the language being typed, regardless of the ordering.

Today’s background music: 野孩子 Wild Children’s new album 燃烧的石头 Flaming Rock, adapted from their soundtrack to the animated film 燃比娃 A Story about Fire. Wordless folk rock, a little bit bluesy, a little bit cinematic, with cool instrumentation and quirky rhythms. www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...

I remember being impressed by the visuals but have absolutely no memory of the plot—what stands out in my mind is the Falungong advertisement inserted mid-way through the .rm file I downloaded via P2P. I ought to give it a proper rewatch.

ok i’ve dealt w all my obligations for the week/day i take a break: i want talk about this web novel—it won an award with the official Chinese Writers Association. that’s a big deal for a web novel published on Jinjiang, a platform meant for women readers only. sci-fi/horror/dystopian/lovecraftian

Fantastic four but it’s parks and recreation references sorry

In an early 1950s Mandarin shortwave broadcast of Kowloon produce prices, would 圆头菜 refer to turnips or cabbage? (The broadcast is essentially a numbers station so the actual meaning has no bearing on the plot—I’m just interested in historical accuracy.)

Lol no, this is a wild mistranslation... Now imagining some shocked Victorian students picking up 肉蒲團 after reading about it in this 1876 guide to Chinese books in the Bodleian and suddenly having a lot of new thoughts about China and Chinese literature... (but not about meat or spinach)

I wrote a radical (full) guide to Wagner’s ring cycle for @vanmusicmag.bsky.social van-magazine.com/mag/wagner-r...

A stimulating Chinese review of my film stephenjones.blog/2025/05/29/g...

maybe I am digging too deeply into this but "recommending the name of a company even though it makes no grammatical sense" feels like a bad sign

The lone long-lost MingKwai typewriter, invented by Lin Yutang in 1947, has resurfaced in a NY basement. How did it get there? Where might it go next? The journey of the groundbreaking invention embodies the search for modernity and Chinese identity. My latest: madeinchinajournal.com/2025/05/02/l...

The Chinese characters that Chao devised for his translation of Jabberwocky are currently in the process of being added to Unicode (here's the submission entry for ⿱卧尨)

I did a long twitter thread on Chao's Jabberwocky translation and his invented Chinese characters, including an image of his annotated proof of the lost 1932 edition of 《走到鏡子裏》("Through the Looking-Glass") prepared by the Commercial Press in Shanghai but blown up by the Japanese.

I would like to think that @loresjoberg.bsky.social predicted the Pope's last words to JD Vance.

I've been intrigued by the criticism of 'podcast' as an elite/elitist cultural phenomenon that has become palpable on social media lately. a viral post on Douban sparked much debate. complaints are typically from young people in lesser known cities and towns,

Some great titles here I’ve already read, and lots more I’m eager to dive into.

Just three days left! storybundle.com/scifi 10 books, $20, a collection of international speculative fiction, supporting independent publishers, no Amaz*n, and some great stuff! Re-posts much appreciated - as if everyone who's purchased so far!

I liked halfbakery dot com, it was the website for half-baked ideas back when half-baked just meant silly rather than unhinged fascist plans to create a global recession and sacrifice billions to the machine god, back when it meant like "a dorsal arm"

It's wild that this is turning up right at the point when I'm polishing up the draft of the Arthur book that ends on *exactly this material*, which isn't just from the Vulgate Merlin, but from specifically from the very end sequence that sets it in a very curious relationship with the Livre d'Artus.

For my money, the best Zhuangzi joke is Ants Riding Sea-Doos from Letterkenny www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hdvp...

This has got to be the worst index I’ve ever seen. Let’s start with Z because the first English entry is “account”=zhànghào. Then C, because the next entry on the English list that doesn’t start with z in pinyin is ”Actions menu“=cāozuò càidān. Then G, because “ad”=guǎnggào.

In then 1980s, there was a guy who traumatized us in South Africa on TV every day.

I know I said this more than once on Twitter (remember when Twitter used to be a thing?), but I don’t seem to have said it here yet: It’s not staying light later; it’s getting late earlier. 🌇

Taking Beijing Subway’s spiffy new Line 12, I was reminded (by its absence) of the DC Metro’s characteristic hum. Not on VPN, I asked Bing, and both morning and evening summaries are garbage: irrelevant, incorrect, and incoherent—and presumably contradicted by the TripAdvisor link that IP blocks me.

Very sad. And infuriating that the proposal for a Webb Centre for Public Transparency to be hosted by HKU was rejected by the university's senior management, despite donors standing ready to fund its endowment.

This is very sad. David Webb’s collection of data has been a treasure trove for journalists and HongKongers alike. Thank you, Mr Webb, for all your hard work. Godspeed! webb-site.com/articles/shu...?

Every Employee of the Startup in Douglas Coupland's 1995 Novel Microserfs and What Kind of Fascist They Would Be in 2025: A List

Some 乙巳年 listening: 蛇 Serpent, from 海龟先生 Mr. Sea Turtle’s latest LP 赛浪20. Half the album is folk pop that reminds me of Bobby Chen; the rest is more eclectic—tho no ska or reggae this time. Also check out 旺旺 woof woof, a sarcastic indictment of online echo chambers. www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBYE...

Cool to see 周二下午谁没来 Tuesday Absentees revisiting their Beijing noir concept album 七七连环杀人调 with a new version of 杀人爱的独剧调, a modernized adaptation of the Su San trial scene from the Peking opera 玉堂春. It really realizes the potential of the old demo version. youtu.be/cFz457-Yyfc?...

New year, new museum. Gates for a Tank Garden 坦克公园 and Tank Museum 战车博物馆 have sprung up along an unopened stretch of road next to Beijing Chateau Laffitte. Nothing to see so far—I think there’s just one lonely tank way back among the trees.

Imagine finding a Mingkwai typewriter while clearing out a basement! Detailed photos at this writeup of Nelson Felix‘s post to the “What’s My Typewriter Worth?” Facebook group. www.ithome.com/0/827/089.htm @tsmullaney.bsky.social

When I stay with my parents, I get to play bagatelle, the tabletop game my great-uncle brought back from England well before I was born. We only played it with company—I guess visiting them counts now. This time I satisfied my curiosity about the endorsement: Walter Lindrum, billiard champion.

Me greeting the arrival of 2025. (時務報第九册)

Every Macao Handover Day I’m reminded of the Shanren song 蚂蚱. It’s not a straight parody of “The Song of Seven Sons” 七子之歌 but the first phrase matches and the lyrics ”Do you eat grasshoppers” are definitely a mondegreen of Wen Yidou’s “你可知 Macao...” www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_o-...

with more than 100 films and TV series adapted from her novels, 瓊瑤 was the single most influential storyteller, the OG brand IP in romance productions in the Chinese speaking world. some of the productions like My Fair Princesses also super popular elsewhere in asia.

y'all know that Chinese people were excluded from using public parks in Shanghai's foreign concession. did you know some people defended this both in that era and now? Yang Changji, a prof at Peking uni, wrote in 1913 that the Chinese are unhygienic & don't have 'public virtue' and therefore

First things first: The Saint of Bright Doors by @vajra.me is brilliant and you all should read it. Second: teaching medieval European art history right now means guiding students away from medieval fantasy for the duration, so I was appreciating the book for not being that, but then:

Learned about the graphic artist Godkidlla 廖小子 from his work on Sorry Youth albums. I love the bricolage typography he did for The Wizard of Oz, via his Behance: www.behance.net/gallery/5569... Also check out work inspired by gold paper and gossip mags: www.instagram.com/p/C55aFiOv4KY/

OK, herewith the promised thread, on tomb figurines and how realistic they were (or weren’t) supposed to be: Ancient Chinese elite tombs (of the prehistoric and Shang periods and into the early Zhou) often included two kinds of dead people besides the principal tomb occupant. (1/n)

一口浓醇回到小时候* “The rich taste takes you back to childhood*” In a footnote, the dairy clarifies: their milk doesn’t actually grant the ability to travel through time: 一口浓醇回到小时候是指一口浓醇回到小时候的味道、场景、情感等回忆 “[] means the rich taste takes you back to memories of the flavors, scenes and emotions of childhood.”

Love how AI is making search a less useful tool for identifying malformed chengyu. Here, 冷俊不禁 returns a bogus AI definition, rather than a paucity of results (which would hint that the searcher has misremembered 忍俊不禁). Source: www.douban.com/people/92058... Poe results link: poe.com/s/ojTIPDNuG9...

Good job spellcheck, these are actually the same thing when you think about it.

My Bluesky timeline’s lining up nicely this morning. @frankconniff.bsky.social

Who’s the intended audience of 中国近代各地小报汇刊续编（第一辑） (朝华出版社 2019), facsimile editions of hard-to-find Republican-era newspapers, if articles are deleted for vulgarity (and damaged source documents blamed)? ishare.ifeng.com/c/s/v006ab-_... Also: “一出版社影印的近代佛教期刊里，目录上的某些政治性文章，在正文里面一概没有，相应的位置也被贴上了广告”