@bilingual: Perhaps one problem might be that of imagining posters here and elsewhere constituting a 'community' through their posts. Words lose their meanings when stretched too far. Serious communal reality has to be elsewhere.
@ satirical and bilingual: Interesting. Seems the problem is that posters tend to think of of their activity as social interaction' rather than as participants in a discussion (such as, for example, one often sees in academia (seminars, etc.), although I'm not saying that's perfect either). I think the substitution of electronic contact for real social interaction (you know, where people actually meet and deal with people rather than with (often useful) electronic intermediaries) is scary. Results tend to be that people go around taking disagreement personally, and personally attack those whose info or thinking is different from or opposed to their own.
Strikes me as childish, and perhaps even a bit paranoid.
A broader social problem here, symptomatic, perhaps, of what we imagine 'Progress' to be (i.e., primarily material and oriented around the promotion of competitive commodity production).
Reckon that's as far as I should go in the direction of getting off the immediate subject today.
zuopaopao: Why?
In the canteens you can eat cheap. The food is okay, sometimes pretty good with a lot of selection. You can get by for about Y40 a day for food in canteens if you want to.
My suggestion for downvotes stands - they're appropriate when somebody's simply not talking about the thread.
But for god's sake, either downvote or don't, but talk about something more interesting.
No results found.
I'm not a health foody but the few meals I've had here have been really good and, yeah, I'll be happy to go back alone to sample all the rest of them. It's also not a bad place from which to people-watch the street below.
Accidentally celebrating the end of Buddhist Lent in Laos
Posted byAdmire you for venturing into a land now more & more unknown - not Laos, but the land of no @##%& cellphones, wechats etc. - there's reality down beneath there somewhere, keep on digging!
Exploring the curious world of Yunnan mushrooms
Posted by@ dolphin: what's' your implied objection?
Creating pub culture in Yunnan, an interview with Teddy Bowers
Posted by@ tiger: 'people in the music scene' - yes, I agree, would be a good addition - but then many of such may have problems thanks to what they have to do to be musicians here while simultaneously maintaining visa status. Wish immigration policy would change to enable.
@ agree with cloudtrapezer - I wouldn't go as far as 'stuffy', and definitely not creepy, but lighten and liven it up sounds right. Personally I have no interest in the Sofitel etc. tendency - though I'm not suggesting that gokunming has bought into all that. I am suggesting that they shouldn't.
The evolution of Chinese National Day in Kunming
Posted byI like the surreal, wide-angle photo of the old Workers' Cultural Palace, nice photo - but it obscures the friendly funkiness of the place as it was in, say, 2003 when I first went there and I'm sorry it no longer exists, There were things about the atmosphere around it which pointed up, at least to me, that, despite plenty of negative things that one can think of that characterized former ideas of social engineering, that there were some good things about it too that are now gone. I'm referring, mostly, to the down-to-earth everyday ordinary humanity of the place as it was. Time marches on etc., but things get lost and sometimes babies are thrown out with the bath water. A lot of the recently-imposed slickness is, in my opinion, negative. Not in political terms, perhaps, but in social terms, the old Worker's Cultural Palace had a real feeling of social equality and fraternity about it that we could use more of now.
Exploring the curious world of Yunnan mushrooms
Posted byThanks, bilingual, that is really far out! I've read a bit about this, thanks to a former student's study paper. I'm currently proposing, in a work of fiction, that, if & when the human species destroys itself, it could be the mycelia that develop consciousness and spread it throughout the universe.