Fair warning: this is rough and addled; I’m in a particularly manic phase of writing/research of my dissertation, which has spilled over into all sorts of areas of my life. But it usually manifests in the desire to write something – anything – other than my dissertation, and read something – anything – other...
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I’ve been lucky during grad school to be ensconced in a place where East Asia matters a great deal and I have to spend very little time explaining why people ought to care about my area of study. In a rare reversal, we are sometimes accused of suffering from the ‘Middle Kingdom mentality’ –...
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Another day, another disgruntled post on how breaking into games journalism is hard (well, more a post about how breaking into games journalism is hard and I QUIT). I was struck yet again about how similar it all is to academia – so many people wanting so few positions, the same advice given to...
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I’ve been trotting through the history of Chinese women in the 20th century in preparation for a course I’m teaching this coming winter. Unraveling these narratives that have been put in service to nation building has been both a trip down memory lane (recalling the early days of my fascination with Chinese history) and...
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In summer the nights . Not only when the moon shines, but on dark nights too, as the fireflies flit to and fro, and even when it rains, how beautiful it is! (Sei Shōnagon, The Pillow Book, trans. Ivan Morris) Summer in Shanghai is draining – it’s hot and very humid, and...
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After a delightful two week trip to Beijing, I returned home to (quoting myself from elsewhere) ”a horror scene of slug trails, dead and dying slugs all over the floor in my main room. Luckily I didn’t notice that one had been cruising around on my bed until the next morning. I had noticed...
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Some assorted musings that are far from complete, probably painting plenty of things with too broad a brush, and a bit kneejerk in reaction. Well, these things happen – it’s a start, and I’ll sort some of this out later. What shade of blue is the sky? A Killscreen piece has been making the...
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Part I: The bare bones of it (sort of) It’s quite strange to be writing openly about all of this, but I guess aspects of it have come up quite a lot since I left (not necessarily related to me in particular, but life at a blog like Kotaku in general). It’s a lot...
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I got a gigantic shock this weekend while idly googling myself (one never knows what’s going to turn up – a habit I got into while I was writing for a blog, it was always interesting to see what people had to say about the things I was posting): I discovered that I’m part of...
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Part 2 of 2: On shanzhai products as an object of study Like Part I, a lot of this is simply my preliminary ramblings on the subject – I still have a lot more research to do (don’t we always), but this is a starting point for me, conceptually and otherwise. I’ve been getting...
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