Brendan O’Kane

oh like a dissertation

love too weave in stakes-based word hooks to underscore framing

Astronaut gun meme: Wait, it's all proxies and heuristics? Close enough

two and a half decades of increasingly distant Trump family members livestreaming proclamations from the driver’s seats of ever crappier cars

Oops! All Wei Zhongxians!

been asking myself “how could this possibly be worse” for a while, but until now the answer had not included “more cloisonné”

goddammit

Look, two and a half centuries is really a pretty good run, as dynasties go

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.