I hate the fact that it is looked down on to be wary of Muslims. Especially Muslim men. Because I hear reports now all the time of Muslim men harassing women, raping women, potentially kidnapping children for sex slavery. You hear about this in Europe, especially Britain, France, and Germany. The videos I see from women in those countries being harassed and threatened and assaulted by Muslim men breaks my heart and makes me sick.
You’re called Islamaphobic and a bigot if you point out the horrific human rights violations perpetuated by Islam and Islamic men in particular. You’re Islamaphobic and zenophobic if you don’t want anymore Muslim immigration into your country because of the humans rights violations committed by Muslims.
They force women into degradation. They take away their ability to choose their dress or role in society. They take away their ability to get education or even proper healthcare. They take away their ability to be seen and heard, in the more extreme areas. Women in Muslim societies are at great risk for sexual violence and death just because they exist as women.
I bought a bluetooth keyboard in Taiwan and thought it was so fascinating how it's labelled for 4 different input methods. It's a very cool and unique souvenir!
Obviously there's the Latin alphabet (QWERTY) in the top left, zhuyin fuhao/bopomofo in the top right, and I figured one of the bottom ones was Cangjie. What the fourth could be was a mystery to me.
After some quick searching, I learned that Cangjie is in the bottom left, and the bottom right is the Dayi input method, which I've never even heard of. Here is a better look.
So far I have only used this keyboard to type in English or Chinese with the pinyin input method, but I’ll have to experiment with one of the other ones sometime—probably bopomofo since I am more familiar with it.
Out of curiosity, I looked up what a Taiwanese MacBook keyboard looks like, and it only has the Latin alphabet and zhuyin. So the 4-in-1 style isn't universal it seems.
Saw this brand name and thought, Koreans must have very different stereotypes about mother in laws than Americans do lmao. If this were an American product it would probably be called "Grandma's chile flakes".
Anti-Gay Censorship in CDrama and US Drama: A Comparison
Chinese Censorship: As long as you can plausibly tell any children in the room that your characters are not fucking and are not literally gay married, go ahead and let your characters be their best gay selves.
If characters love each other deeply and want to express it through words and actions, that’s cool, just find a word that isn’t, like, “husband” or “wife” for their relationship. 知己 is a good one! But “like a true sister/true brother” is also acceptable. Obvious tenderness and joy in each others’ presence? Totally great!
Men, in particular, should have and express a full range of feelings; if they are very emotionally repressed, they need a good friend to help them overcome that strange, unhealthy way of being.
Adopting kids together? Sure! The kids can call both parents some variant of Aunt or Uncle but it’s also cute if they just add “Dad” to each parent’s surname.
Again, as long as you can plausibly say that their two dads aren’t fucking each other--even if they are no women in sight for decades at a time and they take every meal together and give each other backrubs--it’s all good, and in fact is a lovely way to tell a story about a family.
(more behind the cut)
As for happy endings - well, unless it’s a comedy, *someone* has to die tragically so they can be reunited in their next life, right? Because otherwise is it even a story?
Beautiful mourning and funeral scenes are such a great way to show how deeply characters care for each other, as well as being an opportunity for craploads of exposition, as characters explain the plot to their deceased loved ones.
But when deciding who to kill, it’s ok if the hetero characters take the hit. (If you can kill them within minutes of their wedding that’s optimal, but it’s also fine to kill them at another important occasion). Please make sure that anyone (gay or straight) who can’t have a happy ending in the current story promises to meet their true love in the next life. We don’t exactly encourage spiritual stuff, but we’re not made of stone.
If you insist on having your queers stay alive and end up clearly together, make sure you can prove you’re doing it to extract extra money from the audience. (Again, though: can you even call it a romance if nobody dies? isn’t it weird if nobody dies? *wistful sigh.*) If audiences want to pay extra for the novelty of queer characters not dying, that’s awesome and you should milk them for every yuan.
American Censorship
As long as the evangelical Christians who keep our advertisers on speed dial can be 100% convinced that a hero isn’t gay, we’re good. So if the hero cares deeply about their best friend, they should separate at the end of the story. Also they should punch things or people whenever they have a feeling about anything, to prove they are masculine and therefore not gay. And they should randomly make out with opposite-sex hotties if any are available.
Bonus points if the hottie has also made out with the other point of the definitely-not-love triangle at some point, because that means neither dude is gay.
Women who are friendly with other women, or who have, like, practical hairstyles, should talk about wanting babies. Our advertisers know that all women want babies and the only way to have one is by being heterosexually married to a dude.
If your heroine has a bestie who actually has a child already, the child should call your heroine “Auntie” because that’s what straight ladies like to be called.
If you want to have obvious gay people in your show, you need to either make it for a subscription channel like Netflix, that doesn’t need ad revenue, or put them in a scene that can be completely cut out when the homophobes notice it.
For bonus points, blame Chinese censors when you refuse to have gay main characters in your franchise! Even though your films flop so hard in China that they barely cover the cost of marketing.
Even on a subscription service, if you want your queer character to openly declare their love for their partner, it’s best to have them do it in response to harassment or death or feeling upset about something, not because they’re, like, happy.
When a gay character dies - which they should, because otherwise is it even a story? - some other characters can have a brief conversation to indicate that they were gay and somebody noticed that they died.
If the character was super important, their friends should have an informal gathering to celebrate their memory, rather than a proper funeral.
Proper funerals are for proper people.
References: 1. Guardian 2. Ultimate Note 3. Go Ahead 4. Story of Yanxi Palace 5. Nirvana in Fire 6. Nirvana in Fire 7. Captain America: The Winter Soldier 8. A Marvel Comic 9. Avengers: Age of Ultron 10: Captain Marvel 11. Star Wars: Ehhhh 12. The Old Guard 13. Babylon 5 14. The Magicians
冬至 = winter solstice. 湯圓 tāngyuán are small balls made with glutinous rice flour.
小湯圓 xiǎo tāng yuán are the small ones with no filling inside. They are typically red or white.
大湯圓 dà tāng yuán is also called 元宵 yuán xiāo and the common fillings are 芝麻 zhīma / 花生 huā shēng, in a thick sauce form.
Both can be prepared as a savory meal, cooked typically with 茼蒿 tónghāo, a vegetable in the Chrysanthemum family.
There is also 芋圓 yù yuán & 地瓜圓 dì guā yuán, which is made with taro or sweet potato.
both types of 湯圓 are now sold year-round, both fresh and frozen.
小湯圓 is one of the staple dish found at a wedding bandquet; they are deep-fried and tossed with sweet peanut powder. The name of the dish is called 花好月圓 huā hǎo yuè yuán (blooming flowers and full moon).
!!! Domestic violence trigger warning below! !!!
on a rather dark note... the Taiwanese name for 茼蒿 is 打某菜 (lit. hit wife vegetable), because this vegetable greatly reduces in size when cooked, so the name jokingly (god I hope) indicates that the clueless man beats his wife upon seeing the cooked vegetables, thinking she ate most of it and leaving him only a small amount.
Nearby the Italian Embassy in the Philippines, there's a mall that recreated a portion of the Venice Canals inside a shopping mall that you can ride gondolas in.
That building in the center is a roofed dining area of a nearby restaurant connected by the bridge.
I’m sure most people who are into kpop and Korean culture already know how to count age ~the Korean way~, but since it’s JK’s birthday in an hour and I’m feeling productive at home for once, I’m making this post for anyone who might be looking.
So basically when a baby’s born, they are considered a year old. The most widely accepted explanation is that it’s because Koreans count the nine months spent in the womb as a year (I personally don’t buy it but that’s neither here nor there).
Then you gain one year at the start of every solar new year, that is, January 1st. So technically, if you’re born at 11:59 pm, December 31st, after a minute, you’re 2 years old.
But this system doesn’t really apply to babies under 4 years or so (international/normal age). Usually parents will say a baby is X months old until they have their first or second birthday. Then parents will either say their baby is one and a half or 15 months, depending on their preference. When you’re a baby, your birthdays are called ‘dol (돌)’. So when a parent says the baby just had their first dol/passed their second dol, you can assume the baby is one/two years old respectively (international/normal age).
After about 3-4 years your age gets counted “the adult way”, and you gain one year every January regardless of your actual birthday. Your classmates are all the same age as you are until you graduate high school (unless you flunk/skip a grade lol).
An exception to this are the ‘early birthdays’. This isn’t a thing anymore for kids born after 2006, but until then people born in January/February went to school with kids born from March to December in the year before them. This was because in Korea school starts in March, and they wanted kids enrolling in first grade to be of the same biological (=international/normal) age. But as I mentioned above, you start counting your age the adult Korean way after your 3rd/4th birthday, so this system just resulted in kids of varying Korean ages studying in the same grade.
That was unnecessarily long....
Anyway.
So we’ve covered two different ways of counting age in Korea - one is the traditional Korean way, when you turn older on January 1st and not on your birthday, and the other is the normal, globally accepted way, which is to count by your biological age starting from your actual birth date. The former is used in everyday life in Korea. You will most likely never hear a grown Korean in a conversation with another Korean telling their age any other way. The latter you can see being used in hospital charts and on your medicine prescriptions.
So when JK says he came to Seoul when he was 15 years old, or when he sings ‘Twenty-four, feels like I became an adult faster than anybody else’ in My Time, he’s using his usual Korean age, which is 13/14 and 22/23 in biological age. In Korea we call the first type of age “seneun nayi (세는 나이)”, which can be translated as “counting age”, and the second, globally used type of age “mahn nayi (만 나이)”, which is “full age”. So JK, born September 1st 1997, is 24 in “seneun nayi”, and will turn 23 in “mahn nayi” or turn “mahn 23”, on September 1st 2020.
There’s a third way of counting age, which is basically starting at zero (same as biological/international age) and adding a year every January (same as traditional Korean age). This type is called “yeon nayi (연 나이)”, but it’s only used in limited instances. One of them is media - if a story of a person born October 5, 1990 gets news coverage on September 1, 2020, the article will refer to them as 30 years old, even if they’re already 31 in “seneun nayi” and still 29 in “mahn nayi”.
But you don’t need to bother with the third type - just know that “add one year to your actual(biological) age” rule isn’t always accurate. The most foolproof way to count age in Korea the “real Korean way” is to subtract the year you were born from this year, then add 1.
