Dad is ethnic German, Mom is ethnic Chinese, that makes me ethnically confused. But I pass as slightly off-looking Chinese, yes.

<snob>No, I meant tea, not tea dust.</snob>

🤭

<snob>Where do you even get tea in the UK?!</snob>

😉

Born in Germany as a Canadian citizen and now resident in China.

Mine started fine.

Probably my bamboo scroll of 茶经 (The Classic of Tea). SO sprung that on me one day out of the blue. It’s been the centrepiece of my tea photo essays and of any fancy tea setups I have with guests ever since.

OK, this one is going to be tough to explain. I’ll start with pictures:

These are two variants of 陈年八仙果 (chén nián bā xiān guǒ or “Aged Eight Immortals Fruit”). Basically you hollow out a pomelo, fill it with a mixture of plum pulp, tangerine peel, assorted spices (including licorice), and salt. Then you dry it until it’s dense. You cut it up into those wedges you see above and … well … you eat it.

Or you make tea with it.

Or you chop it up finely and use it to flavour meat dishes.

But mostly you just eat it as a snack.

…

5:30 on workdays, anywhere between 7:30 to 11:00 on weekends.

I’m pretty sure that entire message was provided by degenerative “AI”. It just reeks of the format and language of an LLM chat bot.

Could people who have actual technical skills check something for me? Does this code even work?

“Duration” isn’t one of the “familiar first four dimensions”. That’s the point.

it starts with the familiar first four dimensions (length, width, depth, duration)

Duration?

It starts with that?

Then it starts with a complete and absolute failure to comprehend even the basics of relativity.

When (if) science discovers it, then I’ll think of multiple timelines. Until then it’s an entertaining fiction at best.

I think in terms of reality as can be seen, measured, observed, and inferred from that.

“Timelines” and “parallel dimensions” are not a part of any of that, so no, I don’t think of reality as different timelines. Those are (often very entertaining, I’ll admit) fictions.

Nice work!

There are several pre-modern cities with populations as little as 10,000 in history. When I consider that I used to live in this town:

Well, that’s a town of about 3500 people. A third of a “city”. I could bike from end to end of it in minutes, and over the three years I lived there I probably got to know well over half the population by face.

So if “Underdark City” is a pre-modern city with a population in this range, I could easily see this map as being a (smallish) neighbourhood of the city.

I love this one!

Toss-up between autumn and spring.

Spring because that’s when the really good teas start showing up, when most of the flowers start showing (there’s nothing quite as beautiful as a plum tree filled with blossoms and icicles) and the days’ length starts to increase visibly in the race to the equinox.

Autumn because that’s when all the really good crops start hitting the markets, because the horribly humid heat of summer starts to fall, when the moon cakes start showing up (along with the nice delicate rice wines hitting the scene) and the colours start their final run toward their winter forms.

There are some places in the Chinese diaspora where leaving your chopsticks like that will get you soundly rebuked (or smacked if your parents catch you). That’s a superstition that’s taken very seriously in traditional Chinese circles.

Where’s the emoji of Chief pinching the bridge of his nose after 86 speaks when you need it?