ZDL

The repetition between chapters happens because the storyteller of a given story doesn't know if you know the origin story or not. (It's like how every damned Superman or Spider-Man or whatever movie always has to show how Superman/Spider-Man came to be.) Within chapters it could be part of an oral recitation thing with the repetitions being vestigial choruses. There is a lot of scholarship around this novel, and I'm not really deeply involved in any of it. I'm a situation- and opportunity-driven dabbler.

It's a little bit out of date naturally (1300 years will do that to you), but it's actually kind of amazing how relevant it still is today. It doesn't have information on all the different varieties of tea available today (the 2011-published tome The Classic of Chinese Tea which is increasingly the standard textbook for tea production in China corrects this), but what it does mention is still here today processed very much in similar fashions (albeit with upgrades in the equipment for picking it).

It would be a bit of a slog to read (because of some unfamiliar terminology you'd have to check up in the appendices) were it not so short. My trilingual edition is a small hardback book of 150 pages (including some opening pages with pretty pictures, two introductions, a preface, two appendices and a references list). About half that is the English text, so you're looking at reading about 75 pages. I think you could browse it quite successfully over a weekend without strain.

Yeah, talk to the hand, you putrid asshole.

Buh-bye.

The repetition is there because these are primarily oral tales that have been barely edited into something that almost, but not quite, has a coherent narrative.

The tales within Journey to the West come from a very wide period of historical storytelling and are in a wide variety of storytelling traditions. There's very little consistency from tale to tale, and any overarching theme was added much later in forming the "novel". (It's a "novel" in the same way that Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles is a novel, right down to inconsistencies from member story to story.)

I'm splitting my attention between The Classic of Tea and The Legend of Darkness. The former is a nice little hardback with trilingual contents (Classical Chinese, Vernacular Chinese, and English) while the latter is a bilingual edition (Classical Chinese, and English).

Do you think that Musk gives any shits at all if Ghislaine gets pardoned or not? Why would he? She didn't do anything to him, and compassion for her victims is "weakness".

Individual movies are not useful data. Superman as a concept is very American and has little appeal outside of the Americas and almost no appeal in Asia. For example a search on Taobao for " 超人" (Superman's name in Chinese) has about 8 entries for electric razors to each entry for something related to Superman. Even Aquaman is more popular: a search for 海王侠 provides a listing where about 90% of the entries are related to the comic character, despite 海王 being a very popular brand of health supplements and Taobao's search being infamous for throwing anything at you that has even one of the characters you have in your search.

And Spider-Man? Yeah. A search on 蜘蛛侠 gives us so many genuine Spider-Man entries, plus a few that are kinda/sorta related (read: weird knock-offs) that you won't have any problem finding what you want.

So Superman flopped in China (4th at the box office for foreign films) not because of people hating the USA but rather because the character simply doesn't resonate with the local populace. I suspect we can find the same in Korea and Japan.

That is, indeed, the key difference.

The populace of most nations the world over has hated the USA and USAnals for decades now. (Hell, Germans hated the USA back in the '80s when I lived there!) But the governments of most nations were always eager to fellate whoever was in the White House for that entire time, with only rare exceptions here and there.

Now the governments are aligning with the views their people held for decades. That is a major change and will not go well for the USA.

If I got a Tesla for free I'd talk to the local fire department and donate it as training material for putting out lithium fires.

And yet not a single channel that I've clicked that button on has ever showed up in my recommendations ever again.

I literally screen-captured it doing something.

Keep undermining your cause. Apparently the western left doesn't learn from over a decade of continued abject failure.

But do it in your own feed, please. (Not that you'll be polluting mine any further.)