Brendan O'Kane

"Sky, clouds, hills and water were all an unbroken white in the fog and frost, and the only reflections in the lake were a slash of causeway, a dot of pavilion, a mustard seed of a boat and the two or three specks of ourselves aboard it."

New on Stories from a Burning House: A digression, and a favorite Zhang Dai vignette from 陶庵夢憶: burninghou.se/p/snow-and-the…

@grok what does "P. W. Botha deez nuts" mean???

Chinese language folks can’t understand the city’s web page about the studies. “Arena” is translated as “coliseum” (think Roman Empire) and “the city” is translated as “New York City” It’s gibberish. When your community’s future is at stake, Chinatown deserves better than this.

@maoxian Sorry about the spam — it’s a fake user with a name one letter away from mine, and it replies to every single comment on the site with the exact same text. No idea how Substack didn’t automatically catch this; also amazed that there’s no way to bulk delete comments

@bokane You substack comments hacked? #comment-62684816?utm_source=activity_item" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">burninghou.se/p/tao-yuanming…

@Webwight Aw, thanks, Julie!

@sqiouyilu @kourge You're going to love ytenx.org - historical phonology; hours and indeed entire lifetimes of fun

@kourge the best part of the linguistics degree is “ok you little freaks crack the pattern on this phonology set” and we’re going feral over data

what are your favorite free chinese-learning websites? defined very broadly, could be a resource or actual curriculum, but it must not be paywalled (free + pay to upgrade OK)

@kourge @sqiouyilu @ManishEarth @iwsfutcmd @egasmb @AjaanMark @bx_cao @colingorrie That said, anyone learning classical at all seriously should get a copy of the Kroll dictionary (just get the Pleco version; $40 or 50 IIRC) and maybe a secondhand copy of Pulleyblank. But definitely Kroll, which is the closest thing there is to a good dictionary of Chinese.

@kourge @sqiouyilu @ManishEarth @iwsfutcmd @egasmb @AjaanMark @bx_cao @colingorrie More of a reference tool than a learning site per se, but relatedly the Digital Dictionary of Buddhism is very useful buddhism-dict.net/ddb — and for people who read modern Chinese there are of course all the sites (ZDic etc) with pirated Hanyu da cidian content

@hudsonette The guy could write, it turns out!

@bokane Lovely!!

For your weekend: A short vignette by Su Shi 蘇軾, from another Friday night a thousand years ago. burninghou.se/p/su-shi-cheng…

@emilyxnjin Fair play to Netflix, though; the Sonty were important on-screen representation for non-Mandarin-speaking aliens everywhere, finally. Can’t be it if you can’t see it.

i don’t love or hate the show, i think it’s nicely entertaining, but like, is this supposed to be an attempt at chinese representation or something, and i’m supposed to be pleasantly surprised and celebrate how pinyin made it into Netflix as suggested by a recent nyt article??

i’m very confused about why the Netflix 3-body problem decided to call the aliens “santi” (which is technically the planet itself and not its residents, which should be “santiren”) instead of keeping the word “trisolaran”…equally as confused about why i should be proud of this

@yellow_dusk Qian Zhongshu, not a fan, transliterated his name as 愛利惡德 IIRC

@axballoon how on earth could anyone ever walk allllll the way from 7th and Race to 8th and Market, have they no decency

@bokane These same opponents also opposed the reopening of Franklin Square Station which serves the Old City neighborhood where I live.

@siegeweather 大歌帝國, you mean?

Among the many revelations of China's weekend protests are that young Chinese—GenZs and Millennials—aren't what people in the West (and even Chinese themselves!) thought they were. I think we're witnessing the emergence of a new political consciousness or nationalism. 🧵0/11

How to protests under 21st century authoritarianism. A thread 🧵