這是個永不沉寂的都市. 馬路上的車輛像河水滔滔不絕, 暮晚人聲的喧鬧如煙霞漂蕩.





還有不少的照片不過我實在沒心思和時間...

i cried me eyes out watching this movie. tissues kept piling into the bin. its a very endearing and polished (i imagine rosewood and artificially yellowed polaroids) take on the 60s environment of Hong Kong. the family gets on even better than mine and there are obvious lapses in the plot (like wtf what is such a poor kid doing in DBS??) and the corny dialogue and whole white-guy-police, the histrionics...

but i laughed, cried etc. which is what a good movie really needs, not deliberate criticism. okay but the ending sucked. in Beijing atm. i have four ours of lessons a day and other shit to do.

1. You say "the City" and expect everyone to know which one.

2. You have never been to The Tower of London or Madame Tussauds but love Brighton

3. You can get into a four-hour argument about how to get from Shepherds Bush to Elephant & Castle at 3:30 on the Friday before a long weekend, but can't find Dorset on a map.

4. Hookers and the homeless are invisible.

5. You step over people who collapse on the Tube.

6. You believe that being able to swear at people in their own language makes you multilingual.

7. You've considered stabbing someone.

8. Your door has more than three locks.

9. You consider eye contact an act of overt aggression.

10. You call an 8' x 10' plot of patchy grass a garden.

11. You consider Essex the "countryside".

12. You think Hyde Park is "nature".

13. You're paying £1,200 a month for a studio the size of a walk-in wardrobe and you think it's a "bargain".

14. Shopping in suburban supermarkets and shopping malls gives you a severe attack of agoraphobia.

15. You pay more each month to park your car than most people in the UK pay in rent.

16. You pay £3 without blinking for a beer that cost the bar 28p.

17. You actually take fashion seriously.

18. You have 27 different take-away menus next to your telephone.

19. The UK west of Heathrow is still theoretical to you.

20. You're suspicious of strangers who are actually nice to you.

21. Your idea of personal space is no one actually physically standing on you.

22. £50 worth of groceries fit in one plastic bag.

23. You have a minimum of five "worst cab ride ever" stories.

24. You don't hear sirens anymore.

25. You've mentally blocked out all thoughts of the city's air/water quality and what it's doing to your insides.

26. You live in a building with a larger population than most towns.

27. Your cleaner is Portugese, your grocer is Somali, your butcher is Halal, your deli man is Israeli, your landlord is Italian, your laundry guy is Philippino, your bartender is Australian, your favourite diner owner is Greek, the watch seller on your corner is Senegalese, your last cabbie was African, your newsagent is Indian and your local English chippie owner is Turkish.

28. You wouldn't want to live anywhere else until you get married.

29. You roll your eyes and say 'tsk' at the news that someone has thrown themselves under a tube train.

30. Your day is ruined if you don't get a copy of Metro on the way to work.

Aleksander Bogdanov, Red Star (in Bookstore)
Nikolai Fyodorov, “The Question of Brotherhood…” (on Blackboard)
Alexander Levitsky, Worlds Apart: An Anthology of Russian Fantasy and Science Fiction (in Bookstore)
Valery Bryusov, “The Southern Cross,” in Worlds Apart
Alexander Kuprin, “The Toast” and “Liquid Sunshine,” in Worlds Apart
Karel Čapek, R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) (in Bookstore)
Evgenii Zamyatin, We (in Bookstore)
Nikolai Chernyshevsky, “Vera Pavlovna’s Dream,” from What is to be Done?, in Worlds Apart
Fëdor Dostoevsky, “Dream of a Ridiculous Man,” in Worlds Apart
Alexei N. Tolstoy, from “Aèlita, Queen of Mars,” in Worlds Apart
Mikhail Bulgakov, The Fatal Eggs, in Worlds Apart
Mikhail Bulgakov, Heart of a Dog (in Bookstore)
Karel Čapek, The War with the Newts (in Bookstore)
Andrei Platonov, from "The Sun, the Moon, and the Ether Channel," in Worlds Apart
Josef Nesvadba, stories (on Blackboard)
Ivan Efremov, from The Andromeda Nebula, in Worlds Apart
Stanisław Lem, Solaris (in Bookstore)
Kirill Bulychov, stories (on Blackboard)
Arkadii and Boris Strugatsky, stories (on Blackboard) - Roadside Picnic
Stanisław Lem, The Cyberiad: Fables for the Cybernetic Age (in Bookstore)
Stanisław Lem, Futurological Congress (in Bookstore)
Zoran Živković, from The Fourth Circle (on Blackboard)

sorted sorted sorted! now i can just kick back - no worries about uni until it actually starts. i have a room (i also have a variable x for a roommate) and i know i will be paying another fucking £10 ontop of the £20 common room fee just cause i will be shucking along a mini fridge. and probably a rice cooker as well since my mum's bought one for me. 

this is weird. i am...complacent with where i am, what i've achieved so far. is that a bad thing? (this reminds me of the offer holder's open day at LSE and how i felt morose, isolated and stupid with a mantra of "what in bloody hell are these guys" going on and on like scrolling marquee) 

will soon be mailing off my form to Beijing Normal U. no one has told me how much it will cost. no one. i have not the foggiest clue about accomm for six weeks and other expenses and what this course will entail. probably hot hot hot weather. also, you know you are in shit when some guy called "dixon lau" is also part of the CC in your incoming mail from the unknown chinese pundit. who is this person? i shall wait and see. but oh no. i dread/am impatient for summer and all other sundry delights that july and august with an air conditioner shoved through a hole in the wall could bring. 

(btw if i start tagging posts as part of summer hols, it's going to have to accept redundancy in a few years. no more summers)

Michael Swanwick, The Iron Dragon's Daughter (1993). Great work that completely destroys the sentimental aspects of genre fantasy. From within the genre--fairies, elves and all--Swanwick examines the industrial revolution, the Vietnam War, racism and sexism, and the escapist dreams of genre fantasy. A truly great anti-fantasy.

Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita (1938, trans 1967). Astonishing fantasy set in 1930s Moscow, featuring the Devil, Pontius Pilate, the Wandering Jew, and a satire and critique of Stalinist Russia so cutting it is unbelievable that it got past the censors. Utterly brilliant.

The Chrysalids (US title: Re-Birth) is a science fiction novel by John Wyndham, first published in 1955 by Michael Joseph. It is the least typical of Wyndham's major novels, but is regarded by some people as his best.[1]

The Man in the High Castle (1962) is a science fiction alternate history novel by American writer Philip K. Dick. The story of The Man in the High Castle, about daily life under totalitarian Fascist imperialism, occurs in 1962, fourteen years after the end of a longer Second World War (1939–1948). The victorious Axis Powers — Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany — are conducting intrigues against each other in North America, specifically in the former U.S., which surrendered to them once they had conquered Eurasia and destroyed the populaces of Africa.[3]


Particular studies and fields
These are approaches to history; not listed are histories of other fields, such as history of science, history of mathematics and history of philosophy.

Ancient history : the study from the beginning of human history until the Early Middle Ages.
Atlantic history: the study of the history of people living on or near the Atlantic Ocean.
Art History: the study of changes in and social context of art.
Big History: study of history on a large scale across long time frames and epochs through a multi-disciplinary approach.
Chronology: science of localizing historical events in time.
Comparative history: historical analysis of social and cultural entities not confined to national boundaries.
Contemporary history: the study of historical events that are immediately relevant to the present time.
Counterfactual history: the study of historical events as they might have happened in different causal circumstances.
Cultural history: the study of culture in the past.
Digital History: the use of computing technologies to produce digital scholarship.
Economic History: the study of economies in the past.
Futurology: study of the future: researches the medium to long-term future of societies and of the physical world.
Intellectual history: the study of ideas in the context of the cultures that produced them and their development over time.
Maritime history: the study of maritime transport and all the connected subjects.
Modern history : the study of the Modern Times, the era after the Middle Ages.
Military History: the study of warfare and wars in history and what is sometimes considered to be a sub-branch of military history, Naval History.
Natural history: the study of the development of the cosmos, the Earth, biology and interactions thereof.
Paleography: study of ancient texts.
People's history: historical work from the perspective of common people.
Political history: the study of politics in the past.
Psychohistory: study of the psychological motivations of historical events.
Pseudohistory: study about the past that falls outside the domain of mainstream history (sometimes it is an equivalent of pseudoscience).
Social History: the study of the process of social change throughout history.
Universal history: basic to the Western tradition of historiography.
Women's history: the history of female human beings. Gender history is related and covers the perspective of gender.
World History: the study of history from a global perspective.

so bloodyfuckinggoddamn HOT today

It took my sweet time getting round to this book. It's by China Miéville belongs to (loosely speaking of course) this recent genre called New Wierd but The City and The City is a murder mystery told from one point of view: the view of the Beszel Extreme Crime Squad Inspector. A dead woman and a classic bigger-than-you-thought conspiracy isn't what makes this book so extraordinary. (Actually, I would argue that the murder mystery does not really measure up to anything beyond what you usually get from a crime novel).

Mieville creates this almost crazy concept of a city and a doppelganger city Ul Qoma. They aren't simply adjacent, with a definitive border; Beszel and Ul Qoma overlap and this spawns some very Orwellian terms such as "unsee" and ("grosstopically"/"crosshatch") which took me a few chapters to get my head around, where citizens reflexively ignore the buildings, roads, transport and people from the other city. And then there is the darkly sinister Breach whose untold power and silence is enough to be sobering to even the most rude and cocky unifs. (Unificationists).

The story is set in presumably our era - mobile phones, fracturedcity.org and Google are terms used more than once. Mieville even drops in Orciny 2.0. But the execution of everything else feels like a black and white film roll. Colour is not often alluded to in The City and The City. We only know that certain shades are outlawed in Beszel and that cobalt blue is not allowed in Ul Qoma. Everything else is rather dullish, pastel and grey-hued.

Then there is Breach. And breach. Breach is a person, an action, a crime, an organisation or an existence? It's hard to say but towards the end, it is revealed they are not omniscient but use informants. And Orciny's existence is debated in a really mind turning way - a third city? I suppose the dénouement was a slight anti climax, for me. I've read alot of Philip K Dick so I wasn't terribly surprised at how Bowden or some American corporate was behind it all. The curious spatial/time (there is a time difference!) and conceptual novelty of the The City and The City was what made it unique and awesome for me.

Ergo Proxy, 2006
Colorful, 2010
Welcome to the Space Show, 2010
Kurenai OVA July 2010
Durarara!!
Ai no Kusabi
Kaicho wo Maid-sama
Arakawa Under the Bridge
Yojo Shinwa Taikei
Kuroshitsuji II
Amagami SS
Shiki
Ookami-san to Shichinin no Nakama-tachi
Nurarihyon no Mago

Today, I drank 3 cans of coke....That makes it near a WHOLE LITRE. 990ml. No wonder I feel so thirsty and sick. Cooked dinner for myself and my brother. We divide the tasks up pretty well. I cook, he washes. But then I have to check his dubious washing, take in the cloths and take out the trash.

I'm going to hate him when ML and Lin go back to Hong Kong. I will be cursing his obnoxious temperament and pure, undiluted lazy-arse-ness when there is no one else around to do the housework. Ohhhhhh boy.