No, but you can have a neverending bottle of grain alcohol paired with a never-emptying bread bin.

I don’t drive anymore so phone battery.

I’m continuing my binge watch of Grimm.

OK, let’s go with an analogy.

Someone with a decent English vocabulary comes to North America. They have a good vocabulary … but not a good grasp of idiomatic expressions.¹ And sometimes they use the wrong synonym here and there.² It’s a quaint and charming thing. So they want to buy a gift for a friend. A little pocket-sized stuffed animal. Specifically a cat. So they go to Amazon and look for a “pocket pussy”.

飞机杯 (fēijī bēi or “airplane cup”) is not, as I thought, a travel mug for use in aircraft. It’s a masturbatory aid. That means the same thing as a pocket-sized plush cat.

And after one search, followed by uncomprehending staring at the pictures of a few entries (because the text wasn’t easily decoded, being full of euphemisms), I got male masturbatory aids recommended to me for a good five months.

¹ They think, for example, that “horseplay” and “pony play” are basically the same thing.

² For example they might talk about reading a book from beginning to terminal.

The world’s largest digital souq. A huge B2C and C2C conglomerate in which, basically, if it can be sold at all it’s available. I have seen for sale on Taobao the usual things like clothing, toys, food and drink, etc. But here are some other things I have seen sold:

• real estate
• cars
• buses
• a decommissioned jet liner
• Asian giant hornet nests (hornets still living)
• rent-a-boy/girlfriend
• sex dolls (almost RealDoll™ levels of realism) for pets
• soap dispensers shaped like Jackie Chan’s (or other celebrities’) nose
• breast milk soap
• bowls with integrated phone holders so you can use your phone while eating
• bottled flatulence (no, really!)

It’s a wild, wacky, weird, woolly place that has some embarrassing issues related to its recommendation system. (Ask me about “airplane cups”…) And it’s simply the best place to buy anything. Even jet liners.

Taobao. Definitely Taobao. I buy about 85% of my stuff through it and its paired TMall app.

I occasionally use WeChat, I guess? Not very often for texting, though. Usually for the video phone calls.

I don’t know anybody who uses SMS anymore except companies shoving ads at me. I only ever go in my messages app to select all and delete.

There is a whole lot more to a healthy democracy than “I voted”.

China doesn’t need to retaliate. Chinese cinema goers are overwhelmingly choosing domestic product over import in recent years. For 2024, for example, 80% of the Chinese box office went to Chinese productions.

The problem is he brought a deck of poker cards to a chess game.

The movies normalized The American Way™ as the default way of doing things. The billionaires then financed the people pitching The American Way™. Without the first, the second wouldn’t work.

The Chinese market is huge, yes, but increasingly turning away from Hollywood productions to homegrown ones. In 2025 for example 哪吒2 (Nézhā 2) broke scored over $2 billion at the box office, with a record-smashing $1.96 billion of that coming domestically. By way of comparison Captain America 4 only managed $14.4 million so far, a dramatic drop from 2016’s Captain America 3 returns of $180 million in 2016.

For reference, even CA3’s $180 million is an order of magnitude smaller than Nezha 2. CA4’s is two orders of magnitude smaller.

Now this is still true: China’s theatre-going audience, estimated at over half a billion people, is larger than the entire population of the USA. It’s still a hugely important market. But, for example, in 2024 the Chinese box office was estimated at ~6 billion dollars total: and 80% of that went to domestic films. The best-performing foreign film of 2024 (Dune 2) only made $48 million, ranking it about 8th. 7th was 维和防暴队 (Wéihé Fángbàoduì/Formed Police Unit) and it made over $120 million.

I’m pretty sure that the Chinese market for Hollywood films is vanishing.

(Also: opening up a Star Trek community war is “casual”? 🤣 )

Either TOS or Enterprise. Because they were boldly going. TNG was always flying around like a delivery van. Voyager was fleeing home. DS9 was sitting there and waiting for things to come to them. (Well, for the bits I watched; I gave up after the first season and understand things started to actually happen after that.)

I haven’t watched any Star Trek property after Enterprise.

This, right here.

Almost never. If I nap, SO knows there’s something wrong with me.

I’d answer, but I have to take a nap first.

I don’t mind strong cheeses.

…Limburger and Handkäse have entered the chat…

I just don’t like the “funk” of blue cheeses. There’s something about that scent that’s off-putting to me. (Which is weird because I love durian and “stinky tofu” which are often compared to blue cheeses.)