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@weishenyu
something different, something more
taiwanese indie band rec of the week is soulfa靈魂沙發!got to see them live a week ago in taipei, it was awesome :,-) fav songs rn are probably 夏日午睡 & 44 Seconds Road Movie
Zhou
English added by me :)
Book of the Week: Rebirth of the Malicious Empress of Military Lineage
Author: Qian Shan Cha Ke (千山茶客)
Genre: ancient setting, josei
Rating: M (very mature, dark themes but not too graphic of depictions)
My Synopsis: What happens when a girl gets tired of being nice and decides to go apeshit? You get Shen Miao, our adorable 30+ year-old protagonist recently stuffed back into her 14-year-old self and ready to eat the flesh and drink the blood of her enemies! Using this new lease on life, she’ll methodically and maliciously ruin every antagonist’s life using the tools in her versatile skillset, including: knowledge of the future, a psychological understanding of assholes, weaponized gender stereotypes, and men. And lest we forget our love interest, Xie Jing Xing: the boy/man (cause god forbid the author know how old anyone BUT Shen Miao is…) who thought he had it all figured out until he discovered that Shen Miao is a horny drunk. See just how far they’ll go to bathe in the blood of their enemies while keeping their loved ones safe in this very long but extremely satisfying novel.
My Actual Review: It’s so satisfying to see a previously downtrodden character scheme her way into a happy ending, and Shen Miao fucking deserves it. Some reviews that I’ve seen have claimed that the LI eventually takes over her revenge schemes, but I didn’t see it. They just partner up and she uses his manpower to do what she wants. There are also places where their separate goals intersect, so it just makes more sense for him to do the cleanup. The thing about Shen Miao is that she has no issues with letting others do the work for her, especially if it’s against people she wasn’t invested in putting work against to begin with. It’s the empress in her, I fear. As for the main pair as a couple, I loved their every interaction, and their descent into romance felt natural and gratifying. Greatest thing about this romance is the fact that it truly kicks off because Xie Jing Xing did not know to guard against horny drunk Shen Miao lmao!
The translation is pretty good outside of some clunky grammar, but once you train your eyes to glaze over the the five-millionth time the translator inserts directly into the story to complain about how often the LI is described as hot (unlike every other character, I guess???) as if this book is their early 2000s fanfic, it gets even better! Another thing that may or may not be here nor there is that this author is really weird with age consistency. Like, “MC is forever un-aging while everyone else ages 2 years every few months” weird. Shen Miao is forever 14 until the time skip in which she is forever 16, while Xie Jing Xing goes from “the same age as the students” to “17/18ish” to “vaguely in his 20s” during the same course of time where we literally never see Shen Miao acknowledge a birthday in any year. As for more serious content warnings, this story involves underage relationships (including non-explicit sex, marriage, and pregnancy), rape as a weapon, (assumed) incest between cousins, child abuse, and described but not explicitly shown torture. Though there are some humorous parts, this is not a lighthearted story. Read if you want something dark with an ultimate happy ending.
Translation: complete
重生之将门毒后 The Rebirth of the Malicious Empress of Military Lineage By: Qian Shan Cha Ke (千山茶客) A short post on all the summary and teasers tha
10 traditional characters that I didn't know existed
In 2023 I started learning to write traditional characters by hand, so I've been paying extra attention to differences between traditional and simplified forms. In some cases, I didn't even realize the traditional and simplified forms were different!
Here are 10 sets of simplified and traditional characters with subtle differences, 8 of which I only discovered recently. Definitions are adapted from MDBG.
(1)抛 | 拋 pāo
The difference is SO subtle with this one. I have to hold the screen 3 inches from my face to see it. The simplified version has 7 strokes, but the traditional version has 8.
抛 | 拋 pāo - to throw / to toss / to fling / to cast / to abandon
抛弃 | 拋棄 pāoqì - to abandon / to discard / to renounce / to dump (sb) 抛开 | 拋開 pāokāi - to throw out / to get rid of 抛物线 | 拋物線 pāowùxiàn - parabola
(2)滚 | 滾 gǔn
I actually prefer the traditional version, particularly when I'm writing by hand. When I write the simplified version, the 衣 strokes on the bottom always looks awkward under 公 to me.
滚 | 滾 gǔn - to boil / to roll / to take a hike / get lost!
摇滚 | 搖滾 yáogǔn - rock 'n' roll (music) / to rock / to fall off 滚开 | 滾開 gǔnkāi - to boil (of liquid) / boiling hot / Get out! / Go away! 滚烫 | 滾燙 gǔntàng - boiling / scalding 打滚 | 打滾 dǎgǔn - to roll about
(3)匀 | 勻 yún
I think these look pretty much the same when handwritten, but on the computer they are distinct. I definitely prefer how the simplified one looks.
匀 | 勻 yún - even / well-distributed / uniform / to distribute evenly / to share
均匀 | 均勻 jūnyún - even / well-distributed / homogeneous / well-proportioned (figure, body etc)
Mimi Meow (咪咪喵) is a character created by Lin Rongsheng, the owner of a gas station in Tamsui. After noticing how many trucks traveling to and from Tamsui would get into traffic accidents at busy intersections, Rongsheng started to paint Mimi Meow on streetlights and walls, hoping that it would cause drivers and pedestrians to pay more attention to their surroundings.
Local residents and students have joined in the creation by making Mimi Meow doppelgangers, highlighting dangerous areas and pointing tourists to Tamsui's local scenery and cultural features.
characteristics of the taiwanese accent (台灣口音的特點)
bit of a long one today, found an interesting article on the taiwanese accent written by 小熊 on zhihu and thought i'd translate some! (not a direct translation, pulled in some info from other sources & my own comments on it as well)
what is the taiwanese accent?
first, there's a distinction to be made between taiwanese mandarin and a taiwanese accent. taiwanese mandarin combines hokkien and japanese, has less “standard” pronunciation, and is most often used by the older generation; for example:
“你要不要氣高雄玩?” -- 去 [qù] -> 氣 [qì]
“素這樣子噢?” -- 是 [shì] -> 素 [sù]
“這就素台灣狗蟻啦” -- 口音 [kǒuyin] -> 狗蟻 [gǒuyǐ]
otoh, the taiwanese accent is the way of speaking that many find warm/sweet (many tv series will have at least One Female Character playing up this accent to act cute). the accent has the following characteristics:
"Alright, time to see what this animated poetry movie is like-
Oh jesus christ"
To elaborate outside of initial tags:
So this is from 30,000 Miles From Chang’an, which is a 2 hours 47 minutes(!!?) long Chinese animated film that is basically an actually legitimate historical epic and historical biopic (think Gladiator & Amadeus) made into animation, and also passionate tribute to classical art and culture, similar to something like Miss Hokusai or Millennium Actress.
I heard it was decent before, but was not expecting it to be This Ambitious. The Criminally Underrated Champ of 2023 Animation
新年词汇
大家好,新年快乐!
I've been seeing New Year's posts and sayings all over social media lately, so I just wanted to make a post collecting some of the phrases I've seen.
恭喜发财 gōng xǐ fā cái - may you have a prosperous New Year (财 indicating wealth and fortune)
恭贺新春/禧 gōng hè xīn chūn/xǐ - Happy New Year
龙年大吉 lóng nián dà jí - (wishing you) great luck (大吉) in the year of the dragon
身体健康 shēn tǐ jiàn kāng - (wishing you) health
万事兴隆/龙 wàn shì xīng lóng - may everything (万事) be prosperous (兴隆), with the pun that 隆 and 龙🐲 are homophones
龙/荣华富贵 lóng/róng huá fù guì - (wishing you) glory (荣华) and wealth (富贵), again playing with the similarities between 龙🐲 and 荣
龙凤呈祥 lóng chèng chéng xiáng - the dragon and the phoenix will bring luck
梦想成真 mèng xiǎng chéng zhēn - (may your) dreams come true
龙行龘龘 lóng xíng dá dá - (may you) fly like a dragon (i.e., upwards and full of energy)
3x 龍(龙) indicates the appearance of the flight of a dragon
生活䲜䲜 shēng huó yè yè - (may your) life be full of fish
4x 魚 (鱼) indicates abundance, prosperity
前程朤朤 qián chéng lǎng lǎng - (may) the road ahead be shining and splendid
4x 月 indicates brightness, shining
(for more discussion on the unique characters in these last three, see this post on Zhihu)
Hope everyone has a great Spring Festival and a Happy New Year!
春节快乐!
A Queshan struck iron firework (打铁花; da2tie3hua1) performance to welcome the Year of the Dragon. Queshan struck iron fireworks differ from other iron fireworks due to the two-layered pergola and space required. This particular performance also features dragon dancing.
Please see my post here (my pinned post) for the full journey of how OP learned to strike iron fireworks as well as some other information and details about the art. (This is the video OP is referring to at the beginning of the video.)
*Before the countdown, OP is quoting the poem 青玉案·元夕 by 辛弃疾.
[eng by me + edited an ad out]
打鐵花 (da2tie3hua1; struck iron fireworks) is a traditional folk firework that began in Henan and Shanxi, first arising in Queshan county, Henan and later circulating through the whole country. It had first appeared during the Northern Song dynasty, and was most popular during the Ming and Qing dynasties.
For Queshan struck iron fireworks, a two-layer pergola is built and covered with willow branches for performances, under which the molten iron is struck up with two willow sticks to create a rain of fire.
[eng by me + edited an ad out]
(On top of the information in the video, I have some more about its recent history under the cut.)
she’s also the person who made the gigantic ice dragon sculpture o___o
河國榮 Gregory Charles Rivers
(30 April 1965 — 2 February 2024)
Posted this on my Insta Stories a couple days back but decided I'd do a post here too because I realised I'm still feeling saddened by Mr Rivers's passing.
For people of certain older generations, especially those who grew up in the 1990s watching Hong Kong TVB series, Mr Rivers, aka 河國榮 (Ho Kwok-Wing) to HK TV viewers, was an easily recognisable and familiar face, having been (at that time) the only foreign/Caucasian face to appear consistently in HK television armed with an impressive fluency in Cantonese.
I guess his passing has affected me more than I thought it would because firstly, I'd admired him for his proficiency in Cantonese and subconsciously looked to him as an inspiration.
As someone who grew up being terrible at Chinese (both Cantonese and Mandarin) and got teased for being “the banana” (i.e. yellow on the outside but white on the inside), the constant presence of this Caucasian guy on TV who could speak better Cantonese than I, partly spurred me on to learn Cantonese better myself.
Secondly, he represented an age when HK and by proxy, Cantonese, was flourishing; Mr Rivers's story of coming to Hong Kong purely motivated by his love for Cantopop and the Cantonese language is (sadly) not the kind of story one will hear very often again…with his passing, it's like yet another bit of the shine of “Golden Age” HK being taken away…and this “Golden Age” was part of my childhood, so it means another part of my childhood is gone…
Anyway, I'll end this post with this video of an interview Mr Rivers did (c. 2007) sharing his thoughts on his experiences as a foreign actor in HK.
河生,對於學緊廣東話嘅我嚟講,
您畀咗我唔少不知嘅鼓舞。
呢一點,我會喺心裏永遠默默感激。
希望您而家搵到了安寧,同妻子一路走好!
小红书 Vocab
小红书 (also referred to as xiaohongshu or XHS) is a Chinese image-based social media platform. It is a combination of the feed, likes, shopping, and video aspects of instagram, with the ~aesthetics~ and majority female audience of pintrest. I've grown really fond of it and found that it's algorithm is better than instagram and MUCH better than pintrest with giving me content I enjoy.
I'm going to offer some vocab that is either unique to the platform, or slang that is found on the platform (esp in bullet comments). I don't want this to be too long, so some terms may be omitted if they are found on many other social media apps
大草原不可避 : Keyboard smashing in Japanese
I explained how keyboard smashing in English expresses laughing really hard and she taught me the Japanese equivalent in return!!
As some of you might know, in Japanese, “w” from the word “to laugh” 笑う 「わらう」 is basically like “lol” in Japanese so when there’s a bunch of “w”’s together it looks like this wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww
and it looks like a bunch of grass so one slang word to show something is funny is 草 「くさ」 which is the word/kanji for grass so you don’t have to type out a bunch of w’s.
So the step up from 草 is 大草原 「だいそうげん」 which means prairie since there’s a lot more grass.
And if something leaves you laughing so much that you can’t hold it back you could say 大草原不可避 「だいそうげんふかひ」 which basically means “inevitable prairie”.
The “inevitable part”, 不可避 「ふかひ」 in this phrase means laughter is inevitable and you can’t help but laugh.
大草原不可避 <- ‘dacaoyuan bukebi’ wow. this is a complete sentence written in grammatically correct chinese. ‘the grasslands cannot be avoided’. yet it’s japanese
chinese netizens have also taken 2 using 草 the way japanese use it – as ’lmao’. it probs stuck cos 草 ‘cao’ sounds the same as the most common chinese word 4 ‘fuck’
Douyin's learned a new word it seems, because every video has the word "submission" being spammed underneath. Apparently there was an English exam the other day with the word in one of the prompts, and a ton of people didn't know what it meant.
What's funny is I swiped across a guy attempting to explain the word by connecting it to other words, except he assumed the viewer knew what the English words "dom" and "sub" meant, so got these types of comments lmao:
Why would he assume this, where are people using the English words "dom" and "sub"? Like I have seen people sub English for Chinese terms before, except it's like "BDSM", or using "S"/"M" to mean sadist/masochist (sometimes obfuscating it further by replacing them with terms like 星巴克/麥當勞 (Starbucks/Mcdonalds) or clothing size small/medium) where I'm pretty sure people don't really know what they stand for in English, just what they mean? Where is this guy hanging out lmao
Exploring Chinese names of Taiwan
A while ago, I stumbled across this press release for Taiwan's National Names Statistical Analysis report. Then I clicked on the full report and spent days glued to my screen reading it!
So, courtesy of Taiwan's Ministry of the Interior, let's look at some of the data. We will look at: top given names, top full names, and top unisex names.
Format: 陈淑芬 | 陳淑芬 Chén Shūfēn | Chén Shúfēn / 3747人 简体 | 繁體 读音 | 台湾读音 / 人数 (Simp.) | (trad.) (pronunciation) | (Taiwan pronunciation) / (# people) I put simplified first for consistency with the rest of my blog. 简体 | 繁體 is the convention I use in many other posts.
Top 10 given names (by decade)
The report shows the top names by decade, which is really fascinating because you can see how tastes and trends changed over time. I'm just going to show the overall top 10 and last three full decades (1990s, 2000s, and 2010s) but you can see the rest on pg. 280 of the report (pg. 281 of the PDF).
Male
Overall
家豪 Jiāháo / 14,038人
志明 Zhìmíng / 12,719人
建宏 Jiànhóng / 12,196人
俊杰 | 俊傑 Jùnjié / 12,187人
俊宏 Jùnhóng / 11,189人
志豪 Zhìháo / 10,676人
志伟 | 志偉 Zhìwěi / 10,563人
承翰 Chénghàn / 9726人
冠宇 Guànyǔ / 9655人
志强 | 志強 Zhìqiáng / 9101人
1991-2000
家豪 Jiāháo / 4039人
冠宇 Guànyǔ / 3603人
冠廷 Guàntíng / 3399人
承翰 Chénghàn / 3008人
宗翰 Zōnghàn / 2831人
柏翰 Bóhàn / 2594人
彦廷 | 彥廷 Yàntíng / 2502人
冠霖 Guànlín / 2114人
俊杰 | 俊傑 Jùnjié / 2084人
承恩 Chéng’ēn / 1918人
2001-2010
承恩 Chéng’ēn / 2997人
承翰 Chénghàn / 2636人
冠廷 Guàntíng / 2452人
冠宇 Guànyǔ / 2206人
宇翔 Yǔxiáng / 1938人
柏翰 Bóhàn / 1885人
彦廷 | 彥廷 Yàntíng / 1610人
冠霖 Guànlín / 1509人
柏宇 Bóyǔ / 1471人
柏谚 | 柏諺 Bóyàn / 1409人
2011-2020
承恩 Chéng’ēn / 2215人
宥廷 Yòutíng / 2036人
品睿 Pǐnruì / 2021人
宸睿 Chénruì / 1904人
宇恩 Yǔ’ēn / 1860人
宇翔 Yǔxiáng / 1713人
承翰 Chénghàn / 1556人
宥辰 Yòuchén / 1532人
柏睿 Bóruì / 1511人
睿恩 Ruì’ēn / 1503人
Try to guess what “快把我发配宁古塔” could mean.
Context: I shared a story on Weibo about how I experience -17 degree for the first time in Sweden and some people commented the following:
I wasn’t expecting these comments to say the least. To me the 🥵 was hinting as some sexual underlying meaning.
But I couldn’t be more wrong haha.
Turns out, it’s a reference to a 2011 series called 后宫甄嬛传 (hòugōng zhēn huánchuán). It is (according to my friend) the most famous Chinese series about Qing dynasty.
And in this story, if someone commits a crime of offend the emperor they could be sentenced to go to a place called 宁古塔, which is very very cold (like Sweden)
So these comments were asking to be exiled to 宁古塔 simply meaning that they would want to go to a cold place like Sweden haha.
So know you know what this reference means 嘻嘻
快kuài 把bǎ 我wǒ 发配fāpèi 宁古塔níng gǔtǎ
Here’s a 知乎 article about 宁古塔 during Qing dynasty