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brithistorian ([personal profile] brithistorian) wrote2025-09-24 09:25 pm

Dang! Academic smackdown!

I was reading the June 2025 American Historical Review tonight and came across Peter Lorge's review of A History of Traditional Chinese Military Science by Huang Pumin, Wei Hong, and Xiong Jianping, translatied by Fan Hao. It's one of the most brutal academic takedowns of a book that I've ever read. I'd like to share with you the first sentence from each paragraph, which manage to convey the sense of the whole thing, with my comments afterward in brackets.

  1. "The field of Chinese military history in the West has grown considerably in the last couple of decades but remains extremely small." [So this book should be useful.]
  2. "A History of Traditional Chinese Military Science is therefore valuable if only because there isn't much else." [My comment #1 was right, but just barely.]
  3. "The term 'military science' is particularly problematic. [Dang! We're not even out of the title and things are already "particularly problematic!"]
  4. "More problematically, the authors believe that Chinese military thought β€” or military science, in their terms β€” did not change after it was established in the pre-imperial period (before 221 BCE)." [It's never a good sign when any paragraph in a review begins with "more problematically."]
  5. "This brings us to a deep-rooted problem in this book's scholarship." [After two paragraphs of problems, we now come to "a deep-rooted problem"? Damn!]
  6. "Readers unfamiliar with Chinese history, let along Chinese military history, will find the discussions of history and warfare confusing." [In other words, if you know enough to understand this book, you know too much to learn anything from it.]
  7. "The translation itself appears to be generally competent, although the translator is not well-versed in the deeper meanings of either the technical military terms in Chinese or in English." [It looks like he's about to let the translator off the hook, but no.]
oursin: Photograph of small impressionistic metal figurine seated reading a book (Reader)
oursin ([personal profile] oursin) wrote2025-09-24 07:30 pm

Wednesday has attended an online seminar on the Chevalier d'Eon

What I read

Finished The Return of the Soldier.

Started Carl Rollyson, The Literary Legacy of Rebecca West (1997) and decided that I was possibly a little burnt-out on his Rebecca-stanning and took a break.

Moved on to Upton Sinclair, Presidential Mission (Lanny Budd #8) (1947), which occupied most of the week's reading.

On the go

Picked up the Rollyson again.

Have embarked on Anthony Powell, The Military Philosophers (A Dance to the Music of Time #9) (1968).

Up next

No idea.

queen_ypolita: Books stacked to form a spiral (Bookspiral by celticfire)
queen_ypolita ([personal profile] queen_ypolita) wrote2025-09-24 05:34 pm
Entry tags:

Wednesday reading

Finished since the last reading post
Nothing

Currently reading
Still reading Beyond the Door of No Return and really enjoying it. As I've been reading it on the bus, the short chapters have been handy, but that's certainly not the only reason.

Made some progress on Dennis, Jonas, & die Liebe, although that's been a balancing act between trying not to look up all unfamiliar words and having to look up some just to make sure I'm still following what's going on.

No progress with anything else.

Reading next
Probably the library book I picked up yesterday.
brithistorian: (Default)
brithistorian ([personal profile] brithistorian) wrote2025-09-24 10:55 am
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Jimmy Kimmel's return!

A. and I just watched Jimmy Kimmel's comeback monologue from last night. It was great β€” I'm glad to see him back. I've got to say, though: After seeing his supercut of all the time's Trump said not to take Tylenol in his press conference with RFK Jr., I feel an uncontrollable urge to take Tylenol!

selenak: (Young Elizabeth by Misbegotten)
selenak ([personal profile] selenak) wrote2025-09-24 10:32 am

Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light (TV Series)

German-French channel ARTE also put up the complete Wolf Hall, so I was able to watch the six parter they did based on Hilary Mantel's third Cromwell novel at last. What I thought of the novel itself, its plusses and minuses and how it deals with the history, you can read here, so this review is mostly about how it fares as a book adaptation and tv miniseries.

Spoilers have heretical opinions on Mark Rylance as Thomas Cromwell )
musesfool: jar of flower petals, spilling (but there is this)
i did it all for the robins ([personal profile] musesfool) wrote2025-09-23 07:15 pm
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if i could, i would let it go

Baby Miss L is super into Halloween and has two Hello Kitty dolls dressed like skeletons that dance! She might be a skeleton herself this year! Her costume has not been finalized, but there is time.

As I've mentioned, I was never big into Halloween - it was my mom's birthday, so a lot of the time I was home celebrating with her - but it's fun to see the baby into it.

Today is the 12th anniversary of my mother's death. That is a whole seventh grader! It makes me sad that my parents will never know Baby Miss L.

*
queen_ypolita: Woman in a Mucha painting (Mucha by auctrix_icons)
queen_ypolita ([personal profile] queen_ypolita) wrote2025-09-23 08:11 pm
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Deutsch lernen

After continuing privately with our German tutor for the spring and summer terms, it was up in the air what he'd want to do this year. He could only teach on Wednesday, the college had offered him a Wednesday class but he wasn't entirely happy with the time slot, and if we'd wanted to continue to the next level at the college we'd have to opt for a daytime class. One answer to the tangle came last week, as the tutor had decided to reclaim his Wednesday evenings for himself, his partner, and flat-hunting. Which is fair enough. We're still talking about maybe doing some German practice the odd Saturday, but with no concrete plans at the moment.

So I double-checked the available options at the college. The next level up was still out because of the daytime classes and I didn't feel ready to jump over it and go two levels up. But the same level as last year was on offer at a sensible evening slot so I took it, and it started tonight. It's a bigger class than I'm used to, I think the tutor said there are 12 of us signed up. I just need to get to used to having German classes on Tuesday (which I did several years when I was going to Brighton for them) after the past two years of Wednesdays.
oursin: The Delphic Sibyl from the Sistine Chapel (Delphic sibyl)
oursin ([personal profile] oursin) wrote2025-09-23 07:27 pm

Recherches de Temps Perdu (down the back of the sofa?)

These days, I will often find myself puzzling over, what was that person's name? connected with some Thing in the past. I was actually struggling to recall the name of the very weird woman who was the landlady of the bedsit I inhabited near Mornington Crescent in the very early 70s, with whom there came about Major Draaaama (it eventually popped into my mind, as these things do, a couple of days later when I was thinking about something else: see also, finding that book one is looking for in the process of looking for something entirely different.)

I am not sure if this is AGE or the fallibility of human memory, and is it actually AGE and the wearing out of the little grey cells, or just having That Much More stored in them, so that they resemble one of those storerooms in museums where no-one has catalogued anything for centuries and curators have gone in and nicked stuff to sell on eBay -

- I think this metaphor is going a bit too far, somehow.

And yet one can recall quite readily, in fact one might even say intrusively, an obscure pop song by a not particularly renowned group.

That is, after reading that Reacher novel, The Hard Way, the other week, I found myself being earwormed by The Hard Way, a single put out by The Nashville Teens (who were from Surrey) in 1966 which got to all of 45 in the charts. It's not on iTunes even or in any of the compilation CDs, it's obscure. And yet I remembered it and who it was by.

Maybe it was being repetitively played on one of the pirate stations of my youth?

brithistorian: (Default)
brithistorian ([personal profile] brithistorian) wrote2025-09-23 09:26 am
Entry tags:

Potential new fannish activity

I've aspired to be a tag wrangler at AO3 for a while, but each time they opened up applications, I haven't been able to find fandoms I wanted to apply for. They recently opened up applications again, and the fandoms they were looking for wranglers for included a lot of K-pop girl groups, including several that I have written about at length. So I put my application on the 19th and now I'm waiting anxiously to hear back (they said it could be 4 weeks, I put my application in 4 days ago, so I've go plenty of waiting to do). Fingers crossed!

marginaliana: Buddy the dog carries Bobo the toy (Default)
Gummo Bergman's "Silent Strawberries" ([personal profile] marginaliana) wrote2025-09-16 07:45 pm

:dusty-stick:

Various:

--Currently reading Several People Are Typing by Calvin Kasulke, which is a silly epistolary novel told via slack messages at a PR company in which one of the characters has had his consciousness mysteriously uploaded into the company's slack channels and all his coworkers think it's a bit. Also Slackbot is having an existential crisis. Also the gentlest of satires of a PR business carries on around it all. I have actually read this before but did not retain it (as discovered when I checked out the ebook and it opened to the last page) but that just means I get to enjoy it fresh. Do recommend as very light reading.

--The makers of the game Shovel Knight wanted the characters to be body and pronoun swappable - this is a great article about their process of designing the system

--The Book of Love by Kelly Link - DNF. I don't even know any teenagers but I know this is not what teenagers are like, even if they've just come back from the dead. Contains: stereotypical teen sister drama with zero nuance, mysterious authority figure knows things but doesn't reveal any of them and speaks only in the most cryptic of ways because reasons, etc. There was one interesting/creepy bit of worldbuilding but I couldn't be bothered to see if anything came of it because I was so annoyed by everything else. It doesn't seem like it was sold as YA but god it felt desperately 2004-YA. And jagged, in that way modern pop literature uses jaggedness to mean reality. Anyway, unsurprisingly this got rave reviews and I hated it violently.

--Reread Jonathan Livingston Seagull which I believe I last encountered in my teen years and the only reaction I can manage is disdain. But why? Has western society passed out of the time of fable? Am I too close-minded for metaphor? Or is the book just fundamentally not very good? Honestly, I really don't think it's very good. I'm prepared to accept it conceptually but the different sections just don't go. It's cramming five different concepts into a seagull-shaped trenchcoat, and three of those concepts are trying to bite each other's faces off.

--Everyone should tell me their yuletide nominations just so I can be delighted about things I'm probably not going to write.
oursin: Illustration from medieval manuscript of the female physician Trotula of Salerno holding up a urine flask (trotula)
oursin ([personal profile] oursin) wrote2025-09-22 06:14 pm

Brekekekex, ko-ax, ko-ax!

Though probably African frogs do not say that (the chorus from Aristophanes' The Frogs).

Anyway, this was of considerable interest to me having had to do with archives relating to these here amphibians (in which they were described as 'toads'):

Escapee pregnancy test frogs colonised Wales for 50 years

and also read the ms of a work by A Friend on the history of pregnancy testing in which they played a significant role.

They replaced the rabbit test ('did the rabbit die' - the rabbit had to die, actually, in order to examine its ovaries) as this was a non-lethal test and kept producing yet more frogs.

And there was quite an issue of what to do with the little blighters once chemical testing became the norm - as I recall attempts to dispose of them as pets.

Also

The frog is genetically surprisingly similar to humans, which means that scientists can model human disease in this amphibian and replace the use of higher sentient species.

Do we not feel that this is the beginning of some Golden Age sf/horror work? FROGMAN.

tozka: Dawn (from Buffy) reading a book with a starry background (buffy dawn with stars)
mx. tozka ([personal profile] tozka) wrote2025-09-22 08:41 am

πŸ“– reading log: a trip of one’s own

Book Info

A Trip of One’s Own: Hope, Heartbreak, and Why Traveling Solo Could Change Your Life by Kate Wills (2021)

Genre: Nonfiction, Memoir, Travel

LibraryThing: https://www.librarything.com/work/28155352/

Acquired from: Little Free Library, [undisclosed location], USA

Started reading: September 19, 2025

Finished reading: TBD

Bookmark: California bookstore (came with book)

Notes

Page 0: I already travel solo extensively (in fact, full-time for years) but this seems more like a travel memoir than a how-to so I think it’ll be good to read.

She’s following the travels of one of the early travel writers, Egeria, who went on a pilgrimage which means visiting Israel and other nearby sites. In fact this author starts right off in Israel, just fyi.

Read the rest of this entry » )

Crossposted from Pixietails Club Blog.

tozka: title character sitting with a friend (lady lovely locks & friends)
mx. tozka ([personal profile] tozka) wrote2025-08-17 12:14 pm

πŸ“– reading log: the forest unseen by david george haskell

Book Info

Cover of The Forest Unseen

Genre: Nonfiction, Natural History, Ecology

LibraryThing: https://www.librarything.com/work/11720259/t/The-Forest-Unseen-A-Years-Watch-in-Nature

Acquired from: Little Free Library, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA [see log]

Started reading: August 17, 2025

Finished reading: September 2 (DNF)

May come back to this later (in ebook version) but it’s not holding my attention and I don’t want to carry it around waiting for it.

Reading Updates

Title Page: This copy is signed by the author!

Page xii:

Indeed, the truth of the forest may be more clearly and vividly revealed by the contemplation of a small area than it could be by donning ten-league boots, covering a continent but uncovering little.

Page 8: Somebody did a lot of underlining in pencil but stopped after the second chapter. Guessing they DNF’d this, but I’m enjoying it so far. It reminds me of Seasons of the Wild but more satisfyingly science-y.

Read the rest of this entry » )

Crossposted from Pixietails Club Blog.

oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
oursin ([personal profile] oursin) wrote2025-09-22 09:30 am
petra: Barbara Gordon smiling knowingly (Default)
petra ([personal profile] petra) wrote2025-09-21 10:24 pm
Entry tags:

Yuletide nominations

I have made my nominations:
Slow Horses (TV)
The Expanse Series - James S. A. Corey
Galavant (TV)
Doctrine of Labyrinths - Sarah Monette
InCryptid - Seanan McGuire

The nomination coordination spreadsheet is here if you want to see what other people who know the spreadsheet exists have nominated.
greerwatson: (Default)
greerwatson ([personal profile] greerwatson) wrote2025-09-21 06:45 pm
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Yuletide Gift Exchange 2025

Once again, it's that time of year. The annual Yuletide gift exchange opened nominations last week. (See the post.) So I'm aiming this at Forever Knight fans. Yes, I know that I said last year that Forever Knight wouldn't be eligible in 2025; but there haven't been as many new stories posted as I expected. (Or maybe it's more that there weren't as many old stories cross-posted.) Anyway, at this moment, FK has 958 works in AO3 that are complete, in English, and over 1K words in length.

If there are other FK fans thinking of doing Yuletide this year, we should coordinate. When one is actually signing up for Yuletide, one is only permitted to request/offer characters in the tagset; so it's important to get in the ones you want to ask for.

This year, they've upped the number of fandoms one is permitted to request to five. Still only four characters per fandom. Obviously, FK has far more than that! However, by coordinating with one another, we can ensure that we each nominate different ones, thus getting a larger tagset. If we don't coordinate, there's a high probability of duplication.

Nominations are open until 26 September 9pm UTC. Note that local time for you will vary depending on your time zone.

To repeat: if you plan to request/offer Forever Knight for Yuletide, we should coordinate in order to get as many different characters as possible into the tag set.
lannamichaels: Astronaut Dale Gardner holds up For Sale sign after EVA. (Default)
Lanna Michaels ([personal profile] lannamichaels) wrote2025-09-21 05:14 pm

"Teach Us Something, Please." (Harry Potter) G



Title: Teach Us Something, Please.
Author: [personal profile] lannamichaels
Fandom: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Rating: G
Archives: Archive Of Our Own, SquidgeWorld

Summary: Merope Riddle is a disquieting little girl.


In which Tom Riddle is a girl )