The Taiwanese and the Mainland Chinese cannot have experienced #WW2 more differently. When Japan was ransacking China, Taiwan was part of the Japanese Empire, with some people actually enlisting in the Imperial Army on a voluntary basis. If the modern Taiwanese are well-informed about the Japanese atrocities that took place in mainland China, it's only because the Nationalist regime that fled from the mainland after they lost the civil war to the Communists tried to drill those memories into our heads.

This is a bunch of lies Dan fabricated to whitewash himself.
1. He never mentioned anything about contracts in our conversations.
2. He *did* offer to help make the cover art... with the materials I supplied. And yet he said he had *zero* input from me. That is a grave lie. 3. I stopped messaging him simply because I thought we had pretty much sorted out everything. If he felt there was anything that needed further discussions, he could as well drop me a line. I wouldn't initiate a conversation if I don't know what to say.

Most of my English-speaking followers probably aren't into dolls, but I feel like talking about them just for the heck of it.

There are basically two type of dolls, one being dollfies, the other being art dolls. Although they are both technically ball-jointed dolls, the bodies of the former type are mass manufactured by companies like Volks, and there are readymade clothes, wigs and accessories, so it's relatively easy to customize. For art dolls, however, you have to hand-sculpt the bodies, sew the clothes for your dolls and whatnot.

Are blacks the most oppressed minority in the US? I'd say no. That title belongs to Native Americans. Blacks are by no means powerless. They wield considerable power in popular culture, sports, politics, etc. And yet it's all #BLM while the core issue—police reform—got sidelined. It's as if only blacks have historical grievances and face oppression.The transcontinental railway was built on the corpses of Chinese workers, and yet white workers successfully lobbied the Congress to pass the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882.

There's a term called "White Left" (白左) which originated among US immigrants from mainland China.
The White Left believes that State-sponsored programs are the best way to fix social ills, but they've never experienced what the mainland Chinese dub "the iron fist of socialism". Now the whole Left in Anglosphere is shouting #BlackLivesMatter w/o really understanding the complex historical factors that caused America's racial tensions. Thus police brutality got turned into a racism issue. Which is not to say there's no racial dimension to it, but still.

@blashyrkhMRD I didn't know about this thread until I took at look at my Twitter Analytics last night. Jesus, this thread is full of false accusations. I don't know how musing about how race & gender influence one's perspective can be construed as "spinning all this with the race . . . card". @blashyrkhMRD The fact is so many cis white dudes take themselves as the "default value" and refuse to see things from other sides. I admit I overreacted and I regret it, but what did I even say about my Canadian classmates? And you referred to me as a "they", implicitly denying my womanhood.

I don't really think music is about playing whatever you feel like. There are so many standards and conventions in music that you have to start somewhere. Before you break the rules and create your own style, you have to master one or more IMHO. The fact is that there's an almost unbridgeable divide between metal and modern rock. Metal musicians use a lot of techniques that are rarely if ever used in modern rock and vice versa. Metal evolved out of rock and became a different kind of music.

Many people have this misconception that having been educated in Mandarin somehow gives you an advantage at Japanese basics because you already know a lot of Chinese chars/kanji. But kanji is an advanced subject in Japanese and has nothing to do with basic grammar and vocabulary. In Mandarin, with some exceptions, 1 Chinese character usually has only 1 reading. Not so in Japanese, in which a kanji has at least 2 readings (kunyomi and onyomi) and can have up to 10 readings. In terms of syntax, Mandarin is actually closer to Modern English than to Japanese.

The current political divide in the US is insane. Progressives think everything conservatives say is a lie and vice versa. Things were not yet this bad back in the late 1990s, when people of different political persuasions could still be friends, which is still true in East Asia. I'm an anarchist and identify as neither, so I see a clear pattern. To make a generalization, progressives want to leverage State power to cure social ills, whereas conservatives are wary of State power because ambitious social programs can go awry with unintended consequences.

Alex Webster
Chuck Schuldiner
Fenriz
Ihsahn
Mirai Kawashima
(listed alphabetically)

IMHO, the aforementioned five persons are probably the most brilliant musicians in #extrememetal. Alex is obviously a geek. If he cut his hair short, he would probably look like a lawyer lol
Anyway, he talks in a highly logical fashion and did the best job conceptualizing #deathmetal -- it's simply horror movies rendered into music. He's also the main creative driver in CC.

Remember HRC's nonsensical slogan "Zero Suicide"? Americans' obsession with suicide prevention is morbid. When someone hurts or tries to kill herself, it doesn't necessarily mean she absolutely wants to end her life. she could be just signalling her desperation. But try that in the US. Even if you merely hurt yourself, the medical people nearly always interpret it as suicide ideation and try to lock you up. On the contrary, the Japanese traditionally see suicide as an honorable way out of an impossible personal situation.

American #libertarianism is sort of a mixed bag. A lot of male libertarians are very naïve about social reality, placing personal responsibility above everything else. They seem to take wealth concentration in the top 1% for granted, not realizing the complex reasons behind it. Yet tons of people are born into poverty with almost no way out, particularly blacks in the ghettos and Native Americans in reservations. Yes, inequality is inevitable in any society, but it's morally irresponsible not to give a damn about it.

The problem w current #trans writers is they avoid talking abt practical matters, like what healthcare model is best for us & what HRT can do—not just fat redistribution but also psychology, behavior & sexuality. Even w/o SRS, I orgasm the female way, capable of multiple orgasms. Instead, they focus on abstract, theoretical stuff that won't help ppl understand us. I suspect it's bc they're afraid of offending NBs & trans ppl who opt out of HRT. But the fact I mentioned is the best argument that sex *can* indeed change, at least to a considerable extent.

I could've started HRT at 20, but my girlfriend (now wife) forcibly stopped me, never bothering discussing w me about this matter. I made it very clear I was transitioning right from the beginning, but back then she never saw me as a woman. I was vaguely aware, but in retrospect, there were definitely clear signs. I had her read the Chinese translation of Stone Butch Blues, but somehow she was unable to connect it to my situation. Being with her destroyed the self-confidence I had spent several years to build. I put up with it all because I loved her.

Dear #MetalTwitter, please allow me to elaborate on something that's been on my mind:

If you are obsessed with hunting down #NSBM bands (whether they call themselves such or not) and whoever dares listen to their music, unless they are actually associated with neo-Nazi groups... ...then I'd think you are really just trying to feel morally superior -- otherwise you would've burnt Transilvanian Hunger from your record collection. But hey, they are Darkthrone, so everyone just pretends that incident never happened.

In #psychology, many (or most?) studies are based on data gathered from an exclusively Western cultural context. For example, in an English writing course, the professor had a topic about what male facial features women are most attracted to. The conclusion of the study he used is that women are most attracted to squarely, hypermasculine facial features. I was like "Eh? Hardly any woman raised in East Asia would be attracted to facial features of that sort. And the professor was ethnic Chinese.

Ever since humans developed culture, man/woman has always been as much a social concept as a biological one. Men & women developed different in-group cultures, adopted different clothings & hairstyles & were socialized into different behavior patterns. That's why we have gender. I've always believed that the #genderbinary is a cross-cultural, ahistorical phenomenon. Homo sapiens are a sexually dimorphic species after all. There are considerable in-group variation and cross-group overlapping, however, so exceptions may apply.

The saying "Music knows no boundaries" is still true to me, but more and more I've been thinking that exceptions may apply. Sometimes you do have to know the cultural references to really get the music of a band or what they are doing. Take 筋肉少女帯 (KING-SHOW) for an example, Westerners may think they're an okay rock band with a glam metal guitarist, but the concept of the band is to showcase the subcultures of Japanese young social outcasts. My wife said "If you get KING-SHOW, you comprehend modern Japan."

Westerners tend to think that they single-handedly built the modern world. I wonder how many of them know that the Islamic civilization laid down the foundation for modern mathematics and that East Asians invented movable type 300 years before Gutenberg. And now they keep bashing Radical Islam as the most backwards entity on Earth without thinking that they themselves planted the seed for it with historical colonialism. In fact, the Middle East is merely one region of the world they fucked up.

There's an old Chinese saying 天高皇帝遠 (The sky is high up & the Emperor is far away), meaning if u stay away from the centers of political power, ur relatively free from State control. Yet the modern State is so intrusive there's almost no escape even if u hide into the woods. The State was a recent development in the long stream of human history, but nowadays most people can't imagine life without the State. Many people, especially those on the Left, even believe in expanding State power for more bureaucratic social programs.

One distinct feature of #USBM is its utter lack of nationalistic elements. European #blackmetal bands sing a lot about their pre-Christian national mythologies and/or even infuse their music with a dose of 19th-century Romantic nationalism. But I have yet to hear a USBM band sing about the Land of the Brave, Home of the Free, etc. Instead, I've heard Panopticon sing about the history of labor struggle in Kentucky, and Wolves in the Throne Room is philosophically closer to 1960s hippies than Norwegian BMers.