Brendan O’Kane

it’s a dangerous new era of multipolar non-great power competition

He has a colleague named Pierogi

Vertical watercolor scroll: a black and white cat, this one looking kind of mean but equally blobby, perches on a rock beneath a tree.

close-up crop of the cat.

also Ren Bonian - 中華珍寶館 app doesn't have collection information for this one

This surly king by Bada Shanren 八大山人 (aka Zhu Da 朱耷, 1626-1705) remains the best ever to do it

Wang Shishen 汪士慎 (1686-1759), October 1728:

每餐先备买鱼钱，曾记携归小似拳，
一自爪牙动黠鼠，傍人安稳卧青氊。

I set money aside for fish before each meal.
She used to be no bigger than my hand --
Now with claw and tooth she routs the crafty rat,
And drowses by her humans on her mat.

Mods are asleep, post blobby Qing dynasty cats

Chotiner: You've made the claim that no one has ever fed you in your life.
My Cat: Maow.
Chotiner: Yet there's food in your dish right now.
My Cat: Maow.
Chotiner: Let's change the subject to the ripped-open bag of sandwich bread on the floor.
My Cat: Maow.
Chotiner: I have read different things.

Gyoza would absolutely agree to an interview with Chotiner if he thought he could get a treat out of it

Everybody was
haiku writing -- those poets
were fast as lightning

yeah bc we had his sword lol

regret to report that "Cry havoc and unleash the Sword of Chang" works a little too well to forget

someone should invent a medium that isn’t a message

“Talk like a REAL professional lawyer with ProSay.AI!”

In the 1850s, before it was denuded by archaeologists and the tourism industry, 420 species of flowers and plants grew on the Roman Colosseum — and every single one is catalogued in amateur botanist Richard Deakin's Flora of the Colosseum of Rome (1855): publicdomainreview.org/collection/r...

Strong sign that your publicist really hates you

Chotiner respects confidence.

"One clause says that only the state has the right to promote “a system of symbols of Chinese civilisation”"
civilisational discourse in action: as I've been saying, it's about claiming difference internationally and erasing difference internally.

"You posted that you're going to, I'm using your words here, 'win' this interview."

Yes.

"Wow."

Yeah.

"You posted that you're going to, I'm using your words here, 'win' this interview."

Yes.

"Wow."

Yeah.

I would simply win the interview with Chotiner. Amateurs.

(Can I say definitively that this didn't happen? I cannot, but I can think of a couple other possible explanations for an explosion at a gunpowder factory and black powder storage site.)

If we're doing AP stories about non-peer-reviewed articles from zero-quality-control sources, I think I might still have the old 学报 article hypothesizing that a quantum black hole appeared over southwest Beijing on the morning of May 30, 1626, causing the Wanggongchang Explosion.

this is good, but don't sleep on
B433.
Helpful wild beasts
— mustelidae.

Oh, interesting - I gotta look closer. MT just seems inherently dicey with any real-world Classical Chinese, but it’d be pretty cool to be wrong.

Yeah — I’m assuming it’s something custom-trained; looks (from what I remember of a brief glance) better than the custom DeepL model tuned for CBETA a couple years ago. But extremely not-great that it isn’t marking when there’s no human at the wheel.

#OTD in 636: The Tang Bureau of Historiography 史館 completes five dynastic or standard histories 正史 of its immediate predecessors, History of the Liang 梁書, History of the Chen 陳書, History of the Northern Qi 北齊書 and Northern Zhou 北周書, and History of the Sui 隋書.

we should be so lucky

from Tim Brook's excellent 'The Troubled Empire', p 7: ...In that final year, the Yuan dynasty’s last, there were two spottings. The first, on July 9, was in Beijing. A dragon emerged in a flash of light from a well in the palace of the former crown prince and flew off. Later that morning it was spotted in a nearby Buddhist monastery roosting in a locust tree, the bark of which was later found to be scarred and scorched. The second spotting occurred a month later, this time over Dragon Mountain in Shandong province, considered a potent site for praying for rain. During the August storm, the dragon appeared at the crest of the mountain.2 Launching itself skyward, it loosened a boulder that rolled down from the summit and into local folklore. Eight months later, one of Khubilai’s many great-great-grandsons was forced to abandon the Yuan throne and flee back to the Mongolian steppe. The foreign military occupation was over.

sounds like you've had some dragon sightings in the vicinity too

consider the first sentence.

im a warfighter pew pew pew