iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

mrg @mrg.name · 22/09/2026

Langdon Winner nailed a lot of …[gestures vaguely] … all this already in 1997. ”Cyberlibertarian Myths and the Prospects For Community” dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

dl.acm.org

Cyberlibertarian myths and the prospects for community | ACM SIGCAS Computers and Society

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Jarrod Watt @jaywatt.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Asked my newly arrived students from mainland to go out and shoot photos of Hong Kong - strictly no Xiaohongshu locations. One of them filed this from the Ladies Market, a) she nailed the brief and b) I'm sad no-one is going to get my George Takei impression in class today: "Oh my"...

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Bouba's Delivery Service @fernmonkey.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

O Tempura would not be a bad name for a Japanese restaurant

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Jo Wolff @jowolff.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

Oops. We developed new technologies as if we were communists believe that they would reduce human toil, and create conditions for flourishing lives. But actually they dominate us, alienate us from each other, reduce us to servants to machines, and diminish our creativity, just as Marx noted in 1844.

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mrg @mrg.name · 21/05/2026

Andrew Stokols on not understanding China. Having just read Scott’s Seeing Like a State this article is fascinating on two levels, first the short discussion on the planned (in Scott’s sense) city Xiong’an. Second, the state legibility on display in the need to provide ID just to talk to people.

sinocities.substack.com

You Don't Understand China!

On the difficulty of studying a country that makes itself hard to study

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mrg @mrg.name · 15/05/2026

Sigh, in trying to hit the 300 char limit I removed the actual point of the post: "The new machines, *manned by unskilled labor*, produced inferior castings at a higher price.". Perhaps still not interesting but at least it kinda makes sense now...

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mrg @mrg.name · 15/05/2026

In Winner "Do Artifacts Have Politics" (Deadalus, Winter 1980) he mentions a study where the employers introduced new machines that made "inferior castings at a higher cost [and were abandoned] after three years of use [...] by that time they had served their purpose; the destruction of the union."

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mrg @mrg.name · 15/05/2026

Perhaps I will, somewhere in my pile of old text files there's a draft about this that I never got around to post.

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mrg @mrg.name · 15/05/2026

I'd pay good money to be able to use the Pleco dictionaries in the built-in dictionary on MacOS, just hover over a word and press Ctrl-Command-D or deep-click (whatever it is called these days) on the trackpad, and the definition pops up.

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mrg @mrg.name · 15/05/2026

The CAGE Research Centre at Uni of Warwick produces a podcast an series on The Great Divergence with prominent guests like Kenneth Pomeranz himself, Joel Mokyr, Robert Allen, Debin Ma, Bishupriya Gupta and Stephen Broadberry. #history #sinology

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Moss on Stone @mossonstone.bsky.social · 07/05/2026

There are over 70 issues of the women's labor magazine 婦人運動, founded by the Working Women's Society (職業婦人社) available to read or download on the Internet Archive, 1923-1930 archive.org/search?query...

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Moss on Stone @mossonstone.bsky.social · 07/05/2026

There are over 60 issues of the Japanese women's suffrage magazine 婦選 published by the 婦選獲得同盟 on Internet Archive, mostly from the 1920s archive.org/search?query...

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Graham Webster @gwbstr.com · 06/05/2026

You know why this feels familiar is because I’ve been using and studying China’s internet since before the smartphone.

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Lenore Beadsman @lenorebeadsman.bsky.social · 06/05/2026

esce oggi per Orientalia Senza ali per tornare di Du Fu una testimonianza e una riflessione sull’orrore della guerra attraverso i versi di Du Fu (712-770) uno dei più geniali poeti cinesi di tutti i tempi

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mrg @mrg.name · 06/05/2026

Well, I’m not ashamed to admit that I need a dictionary to read the HLM.

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mrg @mrg.name · 03/05/2026

Beats me, seems to be a hapax. Cheiros - hand, ago - to lead -> "hand-leading"? But my Greek is non-existent.

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mrg @mrg.name · 03/05/2026

I haven't really dug into it yet, but that was one of the things that caught my mind. I wanted to read it because I argued elsewhere that an /interesting/ translation has to be somewhat opinionated, but then I it struck me that Boodberg probably aimed at being correct above all else.

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mrg @mrg.name · 02/05/2026

Hot Sinology take: Boodberg's *entire* paper "Philological Notes [...]" is his translation of the incipit of the Daodejing just as the interlinear commentaries on many classical Chinese texts are as much a part of the tradition as the texts themselves. www.jstor.org/stable/27183...

jstor.org

Philological Notes on Chapter One of The Lao Tzu on JSTOR

Peter A. Boodberg, Philological Notes on Chapter One of The Lao Tzu, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Vol. 20, No. 3/4 (Dec., 1957), pp. 598-618

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Financial Times @financialtimes.com · 02/05/2026

The activist known as Teacher Li on the dangerous work of cataloguing everyday life in China — and why he wants to change the CCP, not destroy it: ft.trib.al/Xp0TJn4

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mrg @mrg.name · 10/03/2026

Move slowly and things brake.

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Jo Wolff @jowolff.bsky.social · 26/02/2026

All these books and articles about how to change your life, when for so many people right now the challenge is to keep things roughly the same.

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mrg @mrg.name · 26/02/2026

Legendary CS professor Donald Knuth as he stopped reading email in 1990: ”…15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime. Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But…my role is to be on the bottom of things.” www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email...

www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu

Knuth versus Email

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mrg @mrg.name · 22/02/2026

One of my greatest achievements as a kid was to actually break the supposedly indestructible TAC-2 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TAC-2

en.wikipedia.org

TAC-2 - Wikipedia

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mrg @mrg.name · 18/02/2026

Ah, OK, I see now that LLSPI has an online version, perhaps that is more cost-effective, Legentibus is a bit pricey. My bottle neck isn’t money, though, so for me it’s worth it…

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mrg @mrg.name · 18/02/2026

I don’t want to be an enabler here but I’ve had the same thought lately (despise full-time work and full time-family) and I think you should check out Legentibus. Their course is based on LLPSI and seems, IMHO, perfect for false beginners. legentibus.com

legentibus.com

Legentibus | Learn Latin step-by-step by reading and listening

Learn Latin by reading and listening from day one, from beginner to advanced: stories, novellas, Familia Romana, and literature from Cicero to Erasmus.

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mrg @mrg.name · 18/02/2026

There is no God and Christopher Hitchens is his messenger.

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David Hull 胡大衛 @hushuo.bsky.social · 14/02/2026

Today's hot take: Lego sets that use half or more non-blocky blocks are no longer Lego sets. They have become model kits.

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mrg @mrg.name · 13/02/2026

Oooh, margin notes that also works on mobile! I’ve been fiddling with that for ages. What’s your setup?

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mrg @mrg.name · 11/02/2026

What really boggles my mind is that intelligence agencies would buy a something named after a tool of deception. Wikipedia: ”The stones were an unreliable guide to action […] users with sufficient power could choose what to show and what to conceal to other stones” en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palant%...

en.wikipedia.org

Palantír - Wikipedia

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Yuen Chan @yuenchan.bsky.social · 09/02/2026

Jimmy Lai sentenced to 20 years, six senior journalists and news executives sentenced between 6yrs 9mths and 10yrs. All bad enough. And then there are the little details tucked away (but still being reported) in local media that hit really hard like the story of one woman ... 1/

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The Map Center @mapcenter.com · 04/02/2026

One of my favorite datasets depicts waterways of San Francisco before colonialism drained and paved over many of them. Turns out one of the "lakes" was a copy of a copy of a copy etc etc of an ink spill on a Spanish chart from the 1700s that propagated all the way into a modern .geojson file.

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A. M. Vincent @vincent.northsky.social · 03/02/2026

A used bookshop called Maslow's Hierarchy of Reads.

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mrg @mrg.name · 03/02/2026

This is an interesting article that discusses what it might mean to ”learn from China” madeinchinajournal.com/2025/11/13/s... Perhaps best read with Kuo’s original article (which IMHO more reflects US anxieties than ”the West”). www.theideasletter.org/essay/the-gr...

madeinchinajournal.com

Scale Is Not a System: Learning from China without Mimicry

A reply to Kaiser Kuo that weighs China’s achievements against the limits of performance legitimacy and the value of democratic institutions.

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Graham Webster @gwbstr.com · 02/02/2026

Today's XKCD is a good way to explain to anglophone/US folks how the meaning of a chengyu works.

Cartoon text, two figures:
--HISTORICALLY, IT REFERS TO A CEREMONY TO PREDICT THE
WEATHER USING A RODENT. BUT NOWADAYS PEOPLE OFTEN USE IT TO MEAN "A TIME LOOP
EXPERIENCED BY ONE PERSON."

--...WHAT.

CAPTION: EASILY OUR WEIRDEST HOLIDAY

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aohsu @aohsusometimesy.bsky.social · 02/02/2026

thinking about how for augustine every confession's, like, an accusation...

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Ryan Ho Kilpatrick 何松濤 @ryanhk.blue · 03/12/2025

Finally read "The Great Reckoning" (www.theideasletter.org/essay/the-gr...), and I'm struck by how the worldview the titular reckoning is said to challenge is not one I've ever held or encountered. Despite the subtitle, I learnt a lot more about what Americans tell themselves than I did about China.

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Annie Zaleski @anniezaleski.bsky.social · 28/11/2025

“You’ll be visited by three spirits.” The three spirits:

a photo from the 90s of pj harvey, bjork and tori amos

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Sam Crane @uselesstree.bsky.social · 22/11/2025

The Useless Tree is back! At least for now. I just posted a long piece on my experience last year at the Tenth Nishan Forum on World Civilizations. Come for the politics of Confucian revival, stay for some jabs at Jeffrey Sachs. Good times! uselesstree.blog/2025/11/22/r...

uselesstree.blog

Reclaiming Confucius from Autocracy

The largest statue of Confucius in the world, in stolid brass, looms 236 feet above the neighboring sprawl of the Nishan Center for World Confucian Studies just outside of Qufu, Shandong Province. …

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Lenore Beadsman @lenorebeadsman.bsky.social · 19/11/2025

piccola lezione la giacca che indossa Liu Jinsong non è quella alla Mao nota come "abito Zhongshan" segue per chi fosse interessato la spiegazione dettagliata del significato della "giacca alla Mao" le quattro tasche del vero "abito Zhongshan" simboleggiano le quattro dimensioni del paese 👇

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Chris Brockett @chrisbrockett.bsky.social · 17/11/2025

As one who has spent much time these last few months glaring at texts I can partially decipher but cannot read, I am qualified to recommend this essay. Edging Toward Japan: What does being literate in Japanese really mean? - The Mainichi share.google/Gw4gLrPrnPyI...

share.google

Edging Toward Japan: What does being literate in Japanese really mean? - The Mainichi

By Damian Flanagan The other day I had the pleasure of attending a very interesting presentation about antique books by an expert in Edo period litera

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Jo Wolff @jowolff.bsky.social · 16/11/2025

Can we go back to the days when politicians said that they really wanted to help people but it’s very hard and takes time, rather than saying that they want to hurt people and can do it quickly?

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Kelsey Granger @kelseygranger.bsky.social · 14/11/2025

Excited to say that my article on horse names in China's ancient postal system has been published with Early China! 🐎✉️🌿 Meet Skittish Fish, Calm at the Carriage, and, my personal fave, Cinnamon Stick, at the link below: #animalhistory

cambridge.org

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mrg @mrg.name · 13/11/2025

Finally someone that engages with what it actually means to learn from a Leninist one-party system.

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mrg @mrg.name · 10/11/2025

OPHANIM אוֹפַנִּים (Optical Photon and Antimatter Imager) is a 3800 megapixel camera used in the AEgIS αἰγίς high-energy physics project at CERN. In this blog post The Owlet of Minerva tries to pick apart the scientific, biblical Hebrew, medieval European and Buddhist iconography of the instrument.

A circular circuit board with various icons and a text in latin along the circumference and multicoloured squares in the centre.

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mrg @mrg.name · 10/11/2025

Back when I studied Chinese I had a French roommate for a while and when I got to a ’le’ or a ’de’ in either language there was a 1 in 10 chance I’d switch over to the other without noticing.

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mrg @mrg.name · 06/11/2025

Economists are like medieval scholastics, they produce truth using sophisticated formal methods but completely unrealistic axioms which leads to them to invent epicycle upon epicycle to explain the conjunctions.

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Ryan Ho Kilpatrick 何松濤 @ryanhk.blue · 05/11/2025

Very proud to have contributed a few chapters to this book on the past, present, and future of neon in HK. The process showed me how it’s so much more than just sappy sentimentality to mourn HK’s lost lights — and that despite everything… neon’s not dead. Consider backing our Kickstarter campaign ⬇️

kickstarter.com

A Book: Neon Is Not Dead: The Future of a Hong Kong Icon

It's about the rise, fall, and rebirth of Hong Kong’s living light

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