siegeweather.bsky.social
I work on medieval Chinese literature, calligraphy, book history, and material culture. PhD in Chinese, UC Berkeley. Professor. Translator. Teacher of Mandarin and Classical Chinese. Go/围棋/바둑 try-hard.
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Different bit but this guy’s “song by artist in 60 seconds” shorts are so good youtu.be/3-DTg1Mwsls
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I grew up in West Texas with air raid sirens ringing in my ears and there is a very specific and disturbing way trees move when a tornado is in the area.
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Ragequit AP News homepage after seeing a subhead that said something like, “Clinton also aggressively federal jobs in his first term.”
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Biden went from winning to 昏-ing REAL fast.
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We’re spoiled. There’s just too many 亡国 episodes to choose from!
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Don’t know about actual bloodlust (yet), but for sheer numbers of bad actors and failsons in positions of power we are definitely in that zone where the emperors’ temple names suddenly all have 哀 or 僖 or 閔 in them.
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After learning that Musk allegedly has a botched penis implant (one reason IVF is the method of choice in his harem), I’ve been thinking *a lot* about the last years of the Tang. DOGE is the most last-ditch power-hungry eunuch sounding shit I think I’ve ever heard of.
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Based on this sentence alone, I’ve decided this article is about Junji Ito’s “The Enigma of Amigara Fault” and I won’t be convinced otherwise.
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A common foul in even very high quality textbooks like this. Just checked the Anki shared decks lists and I don’t see one—maybe there are other places where one might find a list like that but I don’t use them.
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Love this assignment~
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I think about this all the time. My struggle is that I teach very high achieving students, which increasingly seems to mean students who have spent their entire lives trying to never EVER do anything weird. Sometimes it feels like watering dead plants. I guess you just have to keep at it.
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I got my totally incorrect information about the how social credit system works from legacy news publications like the NY Times and the Washington Post… and only learned how it actually works from social scientists posting on social media.
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The algorithm is pure chaos, but I think that’s pretty representative. If you know Chinese here’s a great explainer: www.bilibili.com/video/BV14yc...
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Also: avoid David Hinton’s translations and essays.
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Would agree that Owen’s survey The Great Age of Chinese Poetry is still the place to start if you want to see how closely tied poetry was to particular occasions. (If you don’t know what things one simply had to say in a farewell poem, it is harder to appreciate a really good farewell poem.)
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Lucas Bender’s recent book Du Fu Transforms is good, although it is a big expensive academic monograph. Can’t go wrong with Hawkes‘ A Little Primer of Tu Fu if you are primarily interested in the poems themselves.
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He is on record as saying that it was the “only possible move.” It’s not the only move—even an amateur player can see that—but if that’s really the way he saw it in the moment then it is just further proof he is one of the greatest players ever. Nobody else would have seen it that way.
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Absolutely. It’s unclear to me whether Lee understood how AlphaGo’s decision trees worked going into that match. If he knew that playing a tactically sound but puzzling move (Match 4, Move 78) would take it so far out of game prep that it would “freak out,” then he did actually adjust his strategy.
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This is why conversations about what AI *does* can so easily become a form of misdirection. It’s not about what it can or cannot do; it’s about the material and budgetary conditions that the rhetoric of its potential use upholds.
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Well said. A lot of the “anti-AI fury” on this site is displaced anger at precisely this permission structure and the fact that the people most qualified and best placed within their institutions to delegitimize this permission structure refuse to call it out as such.
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The album in question, which is gorgeous and which 3K said he was inspired to make in part by the fact that every human culture has a flute somewhere near the center of its sacred musical repertoire. m.youtube.com/watch?v=vRxG...
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“Each issue of Decivilization comes bound in a special high grit sand paper jacket so that its frequent use destroys the other books on the shelf, including, ideally, your copy of the Zhuangzi.”
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The Zhuangzi itself is already so much finger-webbing. Exegesis can take many forms.
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At the same time, it almost certainly was not intended to do any of that. It is just a record of events in the state of Lu between 722 and 481 BCE. Hence my instinct to duck. It’s a kind non-answer to your question.
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I mean according to a number of early commentarial traditions, it does—the apparently straightforward diction, word order, and juxtaposition of entries encode a subtle critique of political fragmentation and civilizational decline.
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This is the way~
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pure life
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Wow! I’ve been searching for something to show students that engages with close reading as a method by focusing in on a particular text + exegete pairing. Looks like I found it!
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The Spring and Autumn Annals 春秋 *ducks for cover*