🇨🇦🇩🇪🇨🇳张殿李🇨🇳🇩🇪🇨🇦

Half-German, Half-Chinese, Half-Canadian, all-bad at math, currently living to her consternation in the People's Republic of China.

Pronouns: 同志 / 同志 / 同志的
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Writefreely: zhang.dianli (npub1ukc…z88m)

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Last Notes

2024-07-05 10:47:45

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The same thing with music and record shops. Nice music genres were only available in a small number of places, and the gatekeepers hung out in those places (and in the case of one record shop, the gatekeeper was the flippin' OWNER!).
Gatekeeping is real and has a real cost on the field being so kept.
🧵 (2/2)

2024-07-05 10:46:06

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In some cases—RPGs in the late '80s through the '90s, comics (getting worse over time!), and, yes, niche music genres (pretrock and certain styles of metal)—you couldn't until recently really easily avoid said gatekeeping fans.
I got gatekept for RPGs in the '90s despite the unwashed (literally!) gatekeepers likely having been born *AFTER I STARTED PLAYING THEM*. They stunk up (literally) the game shops and latched onto any "outsiders" they perceived like antibodies.
🧵 (1/2)

2024-07-05 01:18:16

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I live not too far from Dujiangyan¹, a hydro-engineering project that's over 2200 years old *AND STILL IN USE TODAY*. (How many of our "great" technological achievements made this century will be able to say the same thing?)
Since the whole story of how it was conceived, how it was built, and how it was used is well-recorded it's really easy for me to remember that ancient peoples were no dumber than we are, and indeed possibly a bit smarter.
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¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dujiangyan

2024-07-05 01:12:19

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The origins of "Pascal's" triangle might even be older than Persia. Zhu Shijie's magnum opus (depicted below in my edition) 四元玉鉴 contains "Pascal's" triangle in a book written in 1303. This he attributes to a book written by Jia Xian c.1050, give or take. (That same book by Jia Xian derived "Horner's" Rule...)
Ancient Chinese and Indian mathematicians were massive powerhouses. The Indians even came up with 90% of what was needed grounding for calculus.
https://files.mastodon.online/media_attachments/files/112/731/199/044/029/842/original/4e5f78ae4c449d63.jpg

2024-07-05 01:05:16

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There's a whole lot of gatekeeping going on in certain fringe circles. Pretentiousrock fans are some of the worst, almost as bad as comic book guys.
"I really like Genesis." "Oh, really!? Did you have that obscure bootleg from 1978 where Phil accidentally dropped his drumsticks and Peter made a quip?" "Uh... no?" "I KNEW IT! YOU'RE NOT A REAL FAN! YOU'RE JUST TRYING TO GET COOL POINTS! REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
So I like my pretrock quietly without the fanbase.

2024-07-03 22:41:06

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No, it really isn't. Vaguebooking isn't a communication style at all.
Buh-bye motherfucker. I shan't be seeing you again.

2024-07-03 22:27:05

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Dodging *WHAT* you utter buffoon?!
WTAF are you on about?!
Did you get dropped on your head and have your language centres damaged as a child?
Holy fucking SHIT! Is this Twitter now or something? 'Cause you're definitely giving off Twitter vaguevibes here!
I'm going to give you one chance—one, no more, no less—to explain yourself before I decide you're a useless mouth-breather who gets muted.
COMMUNICATE, motherfucker!

2024-07-03 11:05:28

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I haven't seen anybody blame Israel for Sudan?

2024-07-03 04:32:49

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In this, the third, civil war in Sudan we have a whole lot of shitfuckery with no real "good guys" (nor even "barely acceptable guys") on either side of the conflict and millions displaced and hundreds of thousands dead. It is itself the product of shitfuckery that goes at least as far back as colonial shenanigans and subsequent partitioning.
It's complicated, in other words, and that's probably really why it's not in the press.

2024-06-26 01:40:26

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So maybe we can, and work with me here, take *all* of their wealth and toss them into work camps so they do things for the benefit of society instead?

2024-06-21 04:57:26

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As a side note, when I was interviewing for a school, I talked to the outgoing foreign teacher. He was bitterly disappointed in China ... for the same reasons I found it EXCITING.
I'd found more optimistic energy in China (especially Wuhan) than I'd found in decades of living in Canada. He, on the other hand, came to China to find quiet, wise kung fu masters or some such thing. So he was disappointed and I was invigorated.
That's one of the weird things that stereotyping brings.

2024-06-21 04:39:56

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Most of the rest of the misconceptions are in this vein. A lot of it stems from the kind of ignorance that's inevitable when dealing with people so far away.
So I don't get offended by "Chinese people eat dogs" (because some actually do; I stress SOME, though).
I don't get offended by the stereotypes of Chinese people as inscrutable mystics. Hollywood is a powerful force, and most exported Chinese pop culture also reinforces that.
I just quietly smile and nod.
🧵 (10/10)

2024-06-21 04:37:05

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More offensive to me at every fucking level than the vilification of the Chinese is the agency-stripping of the Chinese. It's incredibly fucking insulting to hold the attitude that the Chinese are docile sheep who need to be guided by (almost invariably white, most times male) western saviours.
Fuck. Right. Off.
People with that attitude undermine any influence they may ever hold over Chinese people in seconds when that gets exposed. Just fucking stop it!
🧵 (9/n)

2024-06-21 04:34:38

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One of the things that repulses me all the fucking time when I see westerners talking about China is the removal of agency from Chinese people. The way even well-intentioned westerners babble, you'd think the Chinese were programmed robots.
Any time I see people talking about the Chinese as if they were docile robotic sheep, my mind instantly gives me the sentence "Tell me you've never met a Chinese person without actually saying it."
🧵 (8/n)

2024-06-21 04:31:30

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I've actually written about this before¹. Twice². The Chinese have five thousand years of recorded experience with despots. That means the despots have five thousand years of experience in knowing how to do despotism right, but it also means the people have five thousand years of knowing how to deal with despots.
(Protip: Sometimes dealing with them gets REALLY fucking bloody!)
🧵 (7/n)
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¹ https://wordsmith.social/zhang-dianli/china-and-authoritarianism
² https://wordsmith.social/zhang-dianli/palliative-hotel

2024-06-21 04:28:14

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This leads to astonishing diversity in styles of leadership and management and leads to things like people who see, say, how COVID-19 was handled in Shenzhen extrapolating GROSSLY inaccurately to how it was handled in Chongqing or Wuhan or Beijing or Shanghai or Kunming or ... you get the drift.
So let's move on to the next misconception. #3 is only peripherally related to #1/2: the Chinese live in fear of their government and follow its dictates without question or thought.
🧵 (6/n)

2024-06-21 04:24:46

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It is literally impossible for a single person or small group to navigate the fractal complexity of Chinese local culture. Attempts to do so in the past invariably led to disaster. And since the Chinese are almost obsessive record-keepers, these failures are all well-known to the current despots in power.
As a result the Chinese style of authoritarian governance is to set policy and goals and leave it up to the local authorities to get it done.
🧵 (5/n)

2024-06-21 04:23:34

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And this leads to misconception #2: the government is a monolith.
This is very hard for people to understand who haven't experienced it, but despite China being a massively authoritarian state, there is almost scary amounts of local autonomy. Part of this is cultural¹. The rest is practical.
🧵 (4/n)
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¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaven_is_high_and_the_emperor_is_far_away

2024-06-21 04:19:03

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This gets down to weird levels. For example the two dialects I have the most direct experience with (Wuhanhua and Jiujianghua) are both Mandarin dialects, and most of the time they're mutually intelligible, but either can, at the drop of a hat, switch into a mode where mutual intelligibility is gone. In this regard it's like German. It's all dialects of Hochdeutsch in most of Germany, but ... when they want to people in Bavaria can make themselves unintelligible to others.
🧵 (3/n)

2024-06-21 04:16:08

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(For those interested, that's Mandarin, Yue/Cantonese, Min, Wu, Gan, Xiang, Hakka, Jin ... and two others I can't think off off the top of my head at the moment.)
Famously Yue and Mandarin differ about as much as French and Portuguese. But even within the groups there are mostly-unintelligible dialects. For example Min has Minbei and Minnan (north and south), and these are about as different as, say, Spanish and Catalan.
🧵 (2/n)

2024-06-21 04:13:03

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The single #1 misconception I keep seeing, and the one that underlies most others, is that China is monolithic.
It isn't.
Even within the (overwhelming) Han majority of China there are huge differences from one group to another. Evidence: language is the carrier of culture. There are ten mutually-unintelligible major dialect GROUPS in China alone. That's a minimum of ten cultures sufficiently differentiated that they need what amounts to different languages.
🧵 (1/n)

2024-06-13 22:07:13

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I'll be starting in Ottawa and going cross-country to northern B.C.

2024-06-13 11:25:28

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This is one thing I'm going to dread when I go to Canada in July. Because I will be masking the fuck up in enclosed public spaces, and I just KNOW there is going to be some limp-dick who thinks they have the right to tell me what to do.

2024-05-20 06:54:52

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That's very similar to my final conclusion on PbtA-style games: not for me. For very similar reasons.