That’s a quarter-section grid in the image, so he’s showing four models occupying just one square mile of farmland. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section...
14.03.2026 00:03
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That’s a quarter-section grid in the image, so he’s showing four models occupying just one square mile of farmland. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section...
These are the true sports buffs.
Graffiti on a gray brick wall next to a sidewalk: orange 北京 with black shadowing over an orange and yellow starburst, as well as a few other random tags in black.
A new addition to the neighborhood over the winter:
About the Author Josephine Riesman is the New York Times bestselling author of Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America and the Hugo finalist True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee. She was a longtime staffer at New York magazine and its culture site, Vulture, and her work has appeared in The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, The New Republic, and Rolling Stone, among other publications. She is trans and lives in Portugal with her spouse and their cats.
From the author of the New York Times bestseller Ringmaster and the Hugo finalist True Believer, a propulsive and stylish account of Beck, who was received as a pop messiah in the 1990s, but whose closest friends and most devoted fans never knew his buried secrets. Once upon a time, there was a man who made himself into a myth. He went by a single name: Beck. He sang songs that didn’t make easy sense in plain English, but which were somehow urgent and undeniable to those who heard them. He mined a dizzying array of musical styles from the past to construct albums that were eminently of the zeitgeist. Before and after the smash success of his 1993 single “Loser,” he was the hardest-working slacker in America. He went platinum multiple times over. And for a time, he was regarded by journalists and devoted fans alike as the “pop messiah”—a title that referred not just to the new energy he brought to the radio and MTV, but to the devotion he inspired. But something happened to Beck Hansen, right at the turn of the millennium. His music, once defiant and bombastic, turned morose and inward-facing. It was more than just a musical shift. Beck destroyed the online forum where his devoted fans had gathered. He cut ties with the small collective of LA-based bohemians he’d come up alongside, surrounding himself instead with sycophants and celebrities. Beck had been born and raised in the Church of Scientology; many in his orbit feared he’d been pulled back to the faith.
In the years since, Beck’s music has continued to win accolades, including multiple Grammys. But the true story of Beck in the nineties and beyond has never been told. With sensitivity and an arrestingly original style, New York Times bestselling author Josephine Riesman offers a vivid and multifaceted look at a singular artist and the Generation Xers for whom he became a reluctant spokesman. Drawing from interviews with those who’ve been closest to Beck, as well as troves of never-before-published documents, Riesman offers a story about authenticity and irony, paranoia and belief. Situated at the last gasp of the millennium, it’s more than a simple biography—it’s a riveting drama about the blurry lines between fandom and worship; between myth and lies; and between the old world that is dying and the new one that still struggles to be born.
Undecided on pre-ordering THE LAST TEMPTATION OF BECK?
Allow the publisher's marketing copy (below) to entice you...
Then click this link — bit.ly/heartleafbeck — and buy indie from @bookshop.org!!!
I came across that joke before in a pop-psych context as an example of something called the Su Dongpo Effect 苏东坡效应. I don’t recall seeing a source beyond “the ancients”, but your post had me wondering if the effect's namer actually cited a 19C novel. I still don't know—I stopped my search with Zhao.
一和尚犯罪，一人解之，夜宿旅店。和尚沽酒勸其人爛醉，乃削其髮而逃。其人酒醒，繞屋尋和尚不得，摩其頭則無髮矣，乃大叫曰：「和尚倒在，我卻何處去了？」 贊曰：世間人大率悠悠忽忽，忘卻自己是誰，這解和尚的就是一個。其飲酒時更不必言矣，及至頭上無髮，剛才知是自己，卻又成了和尚。行屍走肉，絕無本性，當人深可憐憫。
Funny! The joke is also found in the Ming collection 笑贊 by 趙南星 (And, given that the next dialogue line echoes Zhao’s commentary, maybe lifted from there?) zh.wikisource.org/zh-hant/%E7%...
CNKI shows me one result (from 扬州师院学报(社会科学版), 1992/02) I can flip your way.
Yep. AI summary at Google recently told me that "Rennwagen" was an example for a palindrome. Humanity is working hard on getting dumber.
A banger of a post from @slacktivistfred.bsky.social about a new song from Amy Grant, of all people: www.patheos.com/blogs/slackt...
I was practicing Folsom Prison Blues for my first karaoke outing and I accidentally sang “I’m stuck in Wholesome Prison,” so…
I can't stress enough how weird this book is. written by a couple, there's an entire chapter on "nighttime hierarchies" that supposedly "add color and joy" to life.
press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...
GRAND SECRETARY. The Grand Secretariat 內閣 nei ko, inner hall, was the Supreme Council under the Ming dynasty, but was in practice superseded later by the Grand Council (q.v.). It then formed a Court of Archives with four Grand Secretaries, two Manchu and two Chinese, with the title (colloquial) 中堂chung t'ang central hall, or (literary)宰相 tsai hsiang. The office, with its nominal duties, was the highest honour to which an official could attain. Under the Ming Emperors the familiar title was ko lao 閣老, Elder of the (nei) ko. This was written Colào by the Jesuit missionaries.
閣老. From The Encyclopaedia Sinica, by Samuel Couling, 1917 www.google.com/books/editio...
If anyone is interested in the sequel to COHERENCE, we finally landed on a story worthy of the mission. Unless the actors revolt, we will probably do it just like the first one, where they know their own character details, but don't know what the other actors are going to say or do. Like real life.
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).
Chart comparing length in characters of Chinese source text, length in words of English translation, the and ratio between the two. 字数 Words 汉字:Words 320,000 188,000 1.70:1 185,000 108,000 1.71:1 205,000 116,500 1.76:1 175,500 112,000 1.56:1 230,000 136,000 1.69:1 91,600 61,100 1.5:1 169,000 95,000 1.78:1 159,000 96,000 1.66:1 78,600 45,000 1.75:1
I tend to use 1.6:1 (字数 inclusive of punctuation:words), but the actual number varies. The bigger ratios in this chart (all harder SF titles) are probably due to tech jargon and foreign names. But I’m positive that if I took another look at that 1.5:1 outlier, I’d find a pretty baggy translation.
Congratulations! 🧨
Tom Clancy’s Junk
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.
I picked up 女仙外史 and 绿野仙踪 off a mention in a 倪湛舸 interview and started them both, but Daoist sorcery quickly won out over military strategy. I should really give it another go. Alice Poon recently published a retelling of the Tang Sai’er story, which I’ve heard good things about but haven’t read.
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"
A photo of an Apple keyboard with the alphabet keys changed depending on the frequency of letters in English in this case. the E, A, D, T, I, O, L and N keys are quite large, while Q, X, Z, K, and V are quite small.
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...
The voice does feel a little elevated but it’s pretty inconsistent—dialogue is largely 白话 and even the narration lapses into vernacular. Maybe it’s situation dependent? I’m reminded of 笏山记, which interrupts archaic 三国-style passages with more ordinary 19th century prose.
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.
cover of book by You Hua Zai Ye (There Are Flowers in the Wild) it is stick figure drawings and very cute and casual, does not give an idea of the lovecraftian environmentalist end stage capitalism horror at all
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
IT’S VALENTIMES!
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.)