girzel

Out of everything you've said, my only takeaway is that og:image is useful for Facebook and Twitter. I'll happily admit that's true, and I use it on my own sites.

Otherwise... What does "MUCH more reliable" even mean?

The rest of it seems to be you trying to catch up to RSS...

The Scandinavia influence is showing: they have allemansrecht.

> what we've been able to predict by mathematical inference

Or purely mathematical intuition.

I got a cast iron Lodge pizza pan (iron, not steel), admittedly in large part because I have a cast iron fetish. It was cheap, has served excellently for making pizzas, and doubles as an extraordinarily large griddle for making bulk pancakes or broiling steaks.

If I had disposable income I'd get a https://ooni.com/

For anything larger than a medium-sized single-file script, I use pipenv. It's basically a tie-in between pip and virtualenv, and in my opinion is ideal for creating isolated environments quickly, intuitively, and reproducibly. I haven't had Python frustrations since starting to use pipenv.

I was not paid for this message :)

Is that dom.webnotifications.enabled? God I hope so, I don't know why I didn't look there sooner to turn off this crap.

We've got a neti-pot-like thing that comes with a built-in filter. I don't worry about it past that.

One of my four-month-old daughter's nicknames is Baby Octagon. She's destructive.

I had a migraine a couple of months ago that I thought was a stroke. I didn't even really have a headache, just suddenly had tingling in my hands, and limited vision. I pulled by bike to the side of the road and sat down on the grass, then called my wife. I realized during the conversation that I couldn't remember basic words like "library" (where I was going) and "numb" (what I was experiencing). I felt just like me, but I had like 60% vocabulary. That was one of the scariest experiences of my life -- not pain or disability, but simple loss of words.

Right, I think there's a distinction to be made between education-based cultural continuity ("we all learn Tang poetry in school") and personal cultural continuity ("I learned this knowledge/value/principle from my grandma/village elder/apprenticeship").

10 years is indeed a long time. It's not enough to break the education-based continuity, but it is absolutely enough to break the personal cultural continuity.

My experience of 15 years living in China is, very few people have experienced that personal continuity, to the point where disciplines like Chinese medicine, taiji, traditional music, etc, are best carried on by people in Taiwan or even the US.

Knuth goes in the "old books" category (meant positively).

The writing is a little ambiguous, but I read that more as saying that, as a foreigner, he simply wasn't part of the "real monks'" training regimen. He doesn't say if he tried to get in and wasn't welcome, or preferred to stay on the tourist side of things, but I didn't interpret it as saying that _because_ of the early wakeup times, he wasn't doing the real training.

Now I can't decide if 在地上 is really necessary to get in there. If so, the first line is:

"A screw drops to the ground"

And the last:

"A man dropped to the ground"

Here's my version! The only regret is the "man", which in Chinese should be "person", but "person" has always seemed so poetically dead, to my sense.

《一颗螺丝掉在地上》 A Screw Drops

一颗螺丝掉在地上 A screw drops

在这个加班的夜晚 In this overtime night

垂直降落，轻轻一响 The straight fall, the light clink

不会引起任何人的注意 That draws no one's attention.

就像在此之前 Just as once before

某个相同的夜晚 On a similar night

有个人掉在地上 A man dropped.

You're not alone.

FWIW, I have the same complaint about OsmAnd on Android. I can zoom right in to a street, so I there's essentially nothing else on the screen, and it will still only show me the name occasionally.

Aw, it wasn't meant to be shade! Just the best assessment I could make.

They are definitely comparable in the sense that they are both creators of categories.

Edit: Tolkien is also dead.

Try translating 江湖! That's what really stumps us.

"The Tolkien of Chinese literature" is a marketing phrase produced by the English publisher, and while I totally understand the impetus, I don't think it's quite accurate. Tolkien melded multiple cultural traditions (the Icelandic Eddas, Anglo-Saxon literature, and rural English life) to create an original world that was at once strange and familiar to his readers. Jin Yong wrote stories based in Chinese history, with an extra layer of magic, spirituality, and kick-ass martial arts.

By analogy, it would be like he'd produced a really, really good retelling of the Arthurian legends. It's an impressive achievement, but not quite on the same creative level as Tolkien.

Full disclosure: I agented the English translation to a US publisher (from the UK publisher).

I'm a translator from the Chinese. Yan Lianke has had a couple of different translators, and his writing reads completely differently in different cases. I would recommend trying Cindy Carter's Dream of Ding Village -- I think she did an excellent job, and that's also one of his best books.

Grove Press publishes a novella collection of his called The Years, Months, Days. Those are also excellent examples of his work, and while I'm less enthusiastic about the translator, I know the story Marrow is pretty good, because I edited it :) Seriously, that's just a damn good story in general. Those novellas are I think more accessible to a general readership, because they're very specific, and very vivid. Even if you're unfamiliar with the place and time, the story will more than carry you along.

I think his other published novels, like Four Books and Explosion Chronicles, are not as good. They also require a little more background knowledge.

WeChat is meant to be the only real app on your phone. They are essentially aiming to replace your phone, the way that AOL tried to be "the internet". So they don't really care if the app occupies your whole phone -- that's the point.

My brother put his (Seattle) house on the market about a month too late. What he was expecting to move in days took two months, and at a significant reduction in price. Something definitely changed around mid/late-summer.

Wait until you're 40! The things that are important to you will make themselves known. I'm 40 and have decided the things that matter are my family, writing, piano, taiji, and baking, in that order. A short list, but each one of those things could reward a lifetime of dedicated exploration, and each of them (okay maybe not baking) yields arbitrary philosophical depths. I need to spend time on other stuff, too, but I get that stuff out of the way as soon as I can.

"Upkeep tasks" are never worth making your main focus. Fooling with diets, the quantified life, exercise regimens... these are not worth making the focus of life. They make you healthy and functional -- for what? You need something to be healthy and functional for. Start with that thing (or things), and work backwards. You can't make oiling your wheels (or tending to your .emacs file) the whole point. And I don't mean we all need some all-fired existential purpose in life, I just mean we need something we've decided to do.

If you're not yet 40... uh... hang in there.

Sorry, this might be my first ever man-on-the-mountain, lemme-tell-you-how-things-are post, and I don't mean to make a habit of it. But I've got some years behind me, and a lot of mistakes, and this is something I feel pretty confident about.

I think the main problem with the author of the article is that he's still essentially reacting passively to the world around him. He's acting in response to things that bump up against him -- maybe he's trying to assess whether they're important or worth doing, but he's still fundamentally passive.

The difference between him and his friend who does the triathlon is -- there's no one who looks at the clock early in the evening, glances around their apartment, then checks their phone real quick, then says, "I guess I'll train for a triathlon." That's the sort of desire or goal that comes at a different moment in time, perhaps while you're doing something else, or you're caught between things. And you think, "Shit, I should run a triathlon".

Once you've had that thought, when you get home from work your first thought is, "when do I train for my triathlon?" And once that's done, you fit the rest of the crap in any which way.

The point being, start out with one or more positive, active goals. Prioritize them (as acconrad has said). Everything else just sifts in afterwards. It could be raising your kid, or volunteering for local politics, or playing the piano. Do something first and foremost, something you have decided to do, and you'll find you somehow still have time for all the other crap. (Or you'll find that you don't, and it doesn't matter.)

I agree here: liking Murakami is no guarantee of liking other contemporary Japanese authors (as you can gather from the article in question).

Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata might be up your alley. It's a (little) bit Murakami-esque, and I hear that her upcoming translations are even weirder, which I'm looking forward to.

Going to Walgreens with a hangover sounds like way more work than five minutes fumbling with measuring cups in my kitchen.

How are these things different from home-made rehydration solutions? Basically it's sugar and salt in a specific proportion, right? Or are the salts more complicated than what you have available in your average kitchen cupboard?

Hmmm, with pull-stops to activate various minor modes...