@jasonli@mastodon.social
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jasonli

@jasonli@mastodon.social

Independent designer, artist & educator. He/him. Co-author 🦙, 🪳, The Hanmoji Handbook.

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jasonli, to random
@jasonli@mastodon.social avatar

Boost pls 🍉🙏🏼🍉 a close friend here in Toronto is raising money for her Gazan cousins, niblings, aunts and uncles to evacuate Gaza and resettle in Egypt:

https://www.gofundme.com/f/gaza-family-evacuation-fund

skinnylatte, (edited ) to food
@skinnylatte@hachyderm.io avatar

My friend @jasonli runs the Asian food dictionary! https://www.asianfooddictionary.com/

It’d be nice to have more tofu entries.

Tofu pudding ‘dou fu hua’ (mandarin) is ‘tau foo fah’ (Cantonese) is ‘tau huey’ (Hokkien) and all of these things really exist in my brain depending on where I am and who I’m speaking to (KL or Perak, tau foo fah); in Singapore, tau huey, but in Singapore talking to a northern Chinese person, dou fu hua (and then there’s their names in Thai, Vietnamese, Indonesian)

#Food

jasonli,
@jasonli@mastodon.social avatar

@libroraptor @skinnylatte wow I actually instantly got what a Chinese tamale is (but also I hate it)

It gets worse cuz 豬腸粉 is (at least in HK canto) only referring to plain rice rolls, which is even sadder than just saying rice rolls 🫠🫠🫠

jasonli,
@jasonli@mastodon.social avatar

@libroraptor @skinnylatte nooOooOoOoOoooo NGL one of the main motivators for working on the food dictionary is to stop people calling things “Chinese” this and that like we are in the early 1900s America 👲🏻👲🏻👲🏻

jasonli,
@jasonli@mastodon.social avatar

@geraineon @skinnylatte @libroraptor we gotta rebrand tamales as Mexican zongzi 🤣🤣🤣

jasonli, to random
@jasonli@mastodon.social avatar

Just pushed the spring update to Zebra Crossing, our digital safety checklist 🌸 — new instructions for Signal usernames, new tools like AirGuard, and cleaned up outdated recommendations (👋🏼 TunnelBear).

✨ Website: https://zebracrossing.narwhalacademy.org/
✨ On GitHub: https://github.com/narwhalacademy/zebra-crossing

Details in the thread 🧵:

skinnylatte, to Korean
@skinnylatte@hachyderm.io avatar

Something I love telling people is that the Mandarin euphemism for ‘being horny’ is ‘I ate your tofu / I want to eat your tofu / they ate my tofu’. I feel like we should popularize that in pop culture. Like, you hear that in TV shows (mainly Taiwanese but also sometimes mainland Chinese)

#Languages #Food #Tofu

jasonli,
@jasonli@mastodon.social avatar

@skinnylatte I DID NOT KNOW THIS hahahahaha how did singapore/malaysia get more money-minded than HK canto speakers 🤣

jasonli, to random
@jasonli@mastodon.social avatar

Our ZINE COOP collection of Palestine zines now includes 80+ works in different languages by writers, artists and activists from all over the world 🍉

All of them are free to download, free to print, and oh yes you should absolutely distribute them in and outside of your community ✨

https://airtable.com/appMRZonq9xJyjjVw/shrr0gVaPsTOv7snE/tblk27UUpSTXYOjmF

geraineon, to random
@geraineon@sakurajima.social avatar

Ok lunch time over but now I'm thinking of star ocean 4 which I never finished

I don't even remember the plot and how much I played now. But my PS3 is dead (my PS2 is still alive)

jasonli,
@jasonli@mastodon.social avatar

@geraineon 👀👀 https://store.playstation.com/en-us/product/UP0082-CUSA09485_00-STAROCEAN4201711 (I guess u need a ps4 or 5?)

jasonli, to random
@jasonli@mastodon.social avatar

An antique educational card game called 汉字组字扑克 (Chinese character combination poker) that I found in Penang last year, photographed here to inspire future games and games historians.

The box set didn't come with instructions but I did manage to track down a 1986 patent online from China that does include the instructions to this game. See third image for the final page from this patent.

Full details on our blog at https://88-bar.com/2024/03/historical-artifact-%e6%b1%89%e5%ad%97%e7%bb%84%e5%ad%97%e6%89%91%e5%85%8b-chinese-character-combination-poker/

Some photos of cards, showing how they might be combined by placing the cards next to or on top of one another.
A hand-drawn diagram showing five steps in playing this game (it's not super clear because there are no labels).
A zoomed out view showing the half empty box, and various cards from the pack featuring lots of different animals drawn in a style that's probably inspired by classic Chinese illustrations.

jasonli,
@jasonli@mastodon.social avatar

@geraineon same! though i found it harder than i thought to actually just think up Chinese characters given some radicals/parts on a card when I was laying some of these out for photos.

(mostly I read Chinese on a screen, i rarely write it. and even then English is what I use mainly, so maybe im not the Chinese learning child they had envisioned :p)

geraineon, to random
@geraineon@sakurajima.social avatar

Hello my friends, I made a pillowfort account here: https://www.pillowfort.social/geraineon

(idk how active, if I'll be active at all, but hey if you have an acct there, add me - if you want, of course!)

jasonli,
@jasonli@mastodon.social avatar

@geraineon added! I try to use it once in a while but I never quite get critical mass and get lazy 🥲

jasonli, to random
@jasonli@mastodon.social avatar

Lovely initiative, open for submissions!

“This archive seeks to center personal responses to Gaza within the cartoonist community, regardless of nationality, ethnicity, state-identification, place of birth, or place of current existence.“

https://cartoonistsforpalestine.org/

jasonli, to random
@jasonli@mastodon.social avatar

A reaaaaaaally esoteric discovery based on a query from a scholar of ancient Chinese texts — is it possible to typeset centuries-old, rarely-used Chinese characters from the earliest Bible translations? (Spoiler alert: Yes it is.)

https://88-bar.com/2024/03/digitally-typesetting-rare-ancient-and-esoteric-chinese-characters/

jasonli,
@jasonli@mastodon.social avatar

In short, thanks to the good people/committees at Unicode, there's a code point for most of them (aka you can copy and paste it like a symbol).

And thanks to @babelstone's Babelstone Han font, there's a Chinese font that supports displaying them!

You have to do the install the font first though, so that it shows up as characters not "tofu" blocks in Unicode's character lookup tables https://www.unicode.org/charts/unihan.html

video/mp4

jasonli, to random
@jasonli@mastodon.social avatar

Installed @pop_os_official (Linux for “STEM and creative professionals”) on an old iMac and it’s running great.

The young adult science visuals 🤖🚀 feel more apt for Linux for me (as a way to not mimic a macOS or Windows vibe) and the UI choices are 💯

Heads up though: I did have to run these commands with my iPhone connected via a cable for internet access to fix the WiFi drivers: https://www.reddit.com/r/pop_os/comments/v6hbpj/no_wifi_adapter_found_after_update_to_pop_2204/

jasonli, to random
@jasonli@mastodon.social avatar

A hanmoji GIF to herald in the Year of the Dragon for many of us who celebrate the Lunar New Year ✨🐉✨, excerpted from the latest issue of our emoji puzzles newsletter (now hosted on Mailchimp) at https://mailchi.mp/762f8a98d84a/25-happy-year-of-the-long

An animation of the Traditional Chinese character for dragon morphing into the Simplified Chinese character for dragon and then morphing again into the dragon emoji.

jasonli, to random
@jasonli@mastodon.social avatar

Bringing this over from the birdsite after realizing people here in the Canada/US did not know the production history of this TV show set in a photoshopped Hong Kong.

In case you were wondering if you wanted to watch a show about three "expatriates" (aka privileged immigrants usually from the West) in Asia, none of whom speak the local language... 🙈

(part 1 of 3)

The subtitle says Erasure of Hong Kong women in film. The text narrates: The director ignored the many, accomplished women in film in Hong Kong to pat her and her team on the back. Then there's a screenshotted tweet from the director about how two girls in Hong Kong couldn't believe she and the producer were women in film. Below the screenshot are five highlighted women in film in Hong Kong: Ann Hui, Barbara Wong, Nanshun Shi, Nora Lam and Heiward Mak.
The subtitle says: Erasure of the mixed race, Asian characters. The text then says: In the book, the character played by Nicole Kidman is a mixed race Asian American with a “half-Korean” father (who shares anxieties about being not Korean enough with the other Korean American main character). Then there's a photo of Nicole Kidman's head taken from the show. Then there's more text: Quotes from Part III of the book: “the usually dormant 25 percent of herself that is Korean raises its head” and “...news channels, the local ones making much of the fact that she was a quarter Korean...”
The subtitle says: Production team orientalized their sets in Hong Kong. The text continues with: People were in an uproar when they found out theproduction team decorated their sets to look morestereotypically Chinese. Then there's a photo of a stall with lots of Chinese umbrellas and red lanterns. Then there's a translated excerpt of a local media article: [At the scene were lots of extras, and workers were adding decorations to the stalls: on top of the goods for sale, they added lots of Chinese elements like lanterns, bird cages, Chinese windmill toys, New Year’s fai chun, and so on.].

jasonli,
@jasonli@mastodon.social avatar

(Part 2 of 3)

Subtitle says: White star actor bypassed COVID quarantine period, followed by a screenshot of a Hollywood Report article with the headline: Nicole Kidman Slammed After Skipping Hong Kong Quarantine for Amazon’s ‘Expats’ Shoot. Then a tweet quoted in the article about how Olympic athletes didn't even get these exemptions. Finally at the bottom the text says: Keep in mind, vaccines arrived in Hong Kong later than in the US, and the city only hit a 70% vaccination rate three months after this.
The title says: Erasure of the Cantonese language. The text narrates: The director, a Mandarin speaker born in Beijing and raised in the US, loudly proclaims Cantonese is “dying.”. Then there's a screenshot of the director saying Cantonese is dying and how Mandarin was so often heard in Hong Kong. Then the text continues to say: According to Wikipedia, Cantonese “has over 82.4 million native speakers” in the world (as of 2020). Within Hong Kong, it’s “spoken by 93.7% of the population” (as of 2021) aka 6.9+ million people. That is larger than the population of Finland or Denmark.
The subtitle says: Erasure of the Cantonese language (part 2). The text narrates: Historian Gina Anne Tam responds, followed by screenshots of her tweets that say: As many people have noted, Cantonese is a thriving language, subway announcements are in English, Mandarin AND Cantonese in Hong Kong, and this is an extremely strange way to measure the significance of a language in any city. But let me make one more point... As @ GJosephRoche 's research explains so poignantly, languages do not die on their own; they are made to die. Prematurely calling a threatened language "dying" by using the passive voice is evasive-- it sidesteps which powerful people and institutions threaten its vibrancy. In other words, not only should we not call a language spoken by tens of millions of ppl "dying," we should speak plainly about those who play a role in threatening it. Many ppl have agency in determining which languages get support to thrive and which are starved of that support.

jasonli,
@jasonli@mastodon.social avatar

(Part 3 of 3)

A big shoutout to people in Hong Kong who have been keeping tabs and posting updates about the production.

And if you're looking for something else to watch instead, might I suggest one of the 35+ films that Hong Kong filmmakers released in 2023?

A small line of text at the top says: P.S. The reviews are in..., followed by screenshots from an NPR review of the show. The quoted paragraphs says: The most perplexing thing about Expats is that its story has almost nothing to do with the fact that these women are expats. You could pack up this series and fly it to Manhattan, tell the same core stories about these three women (Margaret's loss, Mercy's guilt, Hilary's marriage), and change ... almost nothing. In fact, you could ship it to Monterey to be the third season of Big Little Lies, and it would have a lot in common with the other seasons (tragedy, guilt, marriage). Perhaps in an effort to avoid saying the wrong thing about expats, or about Hong Kong, Expats winds up saying nothing about those things at all. The insularity of a woman living abroad who doesn't speak the local language is a perhaps ironic mirror of the insularity of a story that doesn't take much notice of its setting other than as scenery.

jasonli,
@jasonli@mastodon.social avatar

@bookstardust you’re welcome 👋🏼

jasonli, to Palestine
@jasonli@mastodon.social avatar

🥳 NOW LIVE: 🥳 ZINE COOP's Print-Your-Own Palestine Zine collection, featuring 40+ free to print-and-share zines about #palestine and the ongoing siege of #gaza. Suggested uses include:

🍉 Drop copies off at a cafe
🍉 Share with curious friends
🍉 Put up an exhibit
🍉 Gift customers if you're tabling
🍉 Donate to your local bookstore

A few more notes about the collection in the thread, but if you want skip straight to it, you can find it at: https://bit.ly/3tsFsbk

jasonli,
@jasonli@mastodon.social avatar

🔍 About our collection process 🔍

We only selected zines that we could a) find attribution for (i.e. a website or social media post from the publisher and/or author), and b) find original download links from their publishers/creators. If we find that the download links are removed, we will also remove their listing on this document.

We have since supplemented these with creator/publisher-submitted zines where we've received explicit permission to share.

jasonli,
@jasonli@mastodon.social avatar

Having said that, please reply and reach out if you know of any zines you think we might be missing! 👋🏼

In particular, we would love to include zines:

🌐 in languages other than English (we only have a few right now)
🌐 on topics and from perspectives that we're missing

jasonli, to random
@jasonli@mastodon.social avatar

✅ VERIFIED ✅ After crawling through hundreds of Google Books and online bookstore search results, I'm 99% sure that our book is the first “traditionally published” children’s book with Cantonese/Jyutping.

Here's a post about my process, but I'll summarize below.

https://blog.byjasonli.com/verified-the-hanmoji-handbook-is-the-first-traditionally-published-childrens-book-with-cantonesejyutping/

jasonli, to random
@jasonli@mastodon.social avatar

Jump starting this newsletter again, ahead of the launch of our paperback edition…

Look at the emoji combo below. What do you think it represents in written Chinese?

💀
❤️

Answers within: https://hanmoji.substack.com/p/21-hello-again

jasonli,
@jasonli@mastodon.social avatar

@geraineon ohhhh fair enough, yeah, we use a very non-scientific-but-as-long-as-its-fun way of mapping emoji to radicals/components 😜

Tho maybe I will use the give up 死心 example next week as a disambiguation note 🤔

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