Or making sure they have work, so it’s actually more of a blessing to I guess.
I’d like to think that my manuscript changes would make at least one person really, really annoyed 8-900 years down the line.

CK3 multiplayer is funny because all my friends are doing incest and regicide, but I’m the most evil person in game:
I’m a travelling daoist immortal for hire who embelishes every manuscript he copies, making the lives if philologists miserable for generations to come.

Reminiscing about how fun virtual machines are to friends in VC and then my FreeDOS VM immediately makes my PC bluescreen. (I was loading CK3 in the background.)

Trying to look up this book on Anna's Archive and I forgot that people are FREAKS.

Saw an old bald guy scribble this on a pillar the day after the elections:
“I’d rather you returned, comrade Jenő Fock!”
Like not even Kádár, he is calling for the dude who designed the New Economic Mechanism to return. I’m amazed.

Since the three week period until the global economy breaks down due to an oil shortage keeps getting pushed back every 2-3 weeks I guess I will just sneak in a few more book orders before global shipping becomes unaffordable.

Old prof read my thesis and said it was "of much interest and a pleasant read".
(I'm too scared to look at his actual comments.)

Sometimes I realise that I am incapable of grasping the kind of abundance Americans live in because I thought Tony Soprano saying he likes the kind of orange juice that says “some pulp” instead of “with pulp” was a joke and not an accurate reflection of products on offer.

I think I figured out what the political situation in Hungary calls for:
I need to read more Márai this summer.

I hope they put Sayonara Zetsubou-sensei in the Criterion Collection next

But I also don’t discuss politics with anyone IRL, so it was kinda hard to hear from someone who also visibly doesn’t discuss this stuff on the daily and he just had it all surge out from him as some desperate plea that maybe discussing it will help resolve his contradictions.

So obviously I don’t really have high political hopes, because I don’t really have much political desire save for not being bothered by the hardcore maniacs on either side.

Considering for someone who never lived under socialism or experienced the hope of the 90s, and the turbulence of the 2000s is just sort of a faint memory or collection of facts I know from cynical and hateful articles older friends would pass onto me so I learn something.

But I guess if someone is more of a committed humanist who went through the 90s, then the disaster that was the 2000s political scene and then the whole thing landed on 16 years of Hungary being a Christian Democratic Cuba for the right it must be a lot harder.

This isn’t really a post on the ”horrors of authoritarianism” because honestly nobody ever put a gun to my head in the “last 16 years“ and I think that’s a pretty good benchmark of authoritarianism.
More like, it was just a mundane system. Things ran until it got voted out.

So I ended up solving the politcal question that makes most people in this country go mad by a mixture of “internal exile” and just being a cynical asshole in a constant pouncing position. Always attack everyone, never defend anything, that way no one can hit back.

Reality is that due to how I was mostly socialized politically, “Orbánism” was always just “business as usual”. I never really revelled in what the government was doing, but I also never really got my teeth kicked in by them either.

It was honestly crushing to hear the pleas of a professor over a cigarette that he isn’t even fed up with “the last 16 years”, he is disappointed by the last 35 years.
A guy I respect and he opens up and tells me he is completely and utterly broken by public life in Hungary.

Got called a “strategic pessimist” over politics yesterday.

This shit genuinely reads like it was written by a geriatric dipshit writing for one of Britain’s “Newspapers of record”.
I’m sorry. (Funny as fuck if intentional tho.)

至子祀

開端丰端

To all the Sinologists: I keep finding little dedications on the first volumes of books at the bottom within the stitching of the spine (both front/back). Is there a specific term for this?
As far as I can decipher them, the two examples here read: 至子祀 and 開端丰端
#ChinaBooks

”Hungarian as foreign language” dept has this cutesy sheet on the wall about “What are the Hungarians like?”

The student wrote that we primarily drink alcohol, work as policemen and our defining characteristics are our friendliness and humour.

The interesting bit to me is how Clavicular is watched by like a few thousand people at best, and it’s not even he himself and his content but the second and thirdhand content about him is what’s making rounds.

Very similar to old lolcow dynamics.

i kinda got filtered by qing dynasty erotica one time bc i thought it was funny as long as it was talking about the buckets of fluid the MC’s wife emitted and the doggerel he and his bf wrote back and forth but once they started raping a slave (swans ref??) girlchild i was like whoaa not cool :/

When I ordered this used copy of Dune I really wasn’t expecting it to be a 1000 page long trade paperback.
How does this thing still have an intact spine?

Doing homework late into the evening for a seminar. The task was handed out last week: "Translate this short article about Orbán and Erdogan meeting in Budapest".
It feels weirdly pointless now.

What life feels like now that I don't have to write the thesis anymore

Apparently the transcription the newspaper of the Chinese community in Hungary (Új Szemle/新导报) seems to be going with for Péter Magyar is Maojiao'er Bide 毛焦尔·彼得

Uploaded my MA thesis.
Too bad it's too late to open a bottle of wine. Well, maybe tomorrow.
But it's up there.

Final stats are kind of impressive. I don't think I've ever written anything this long.

My MA is going to be 92 pages long, 40 pages of which is an appendix with half of the Huangdi sijing in Hungarian, two essays by Chao Cuo and an essay by Su Dongpo.
Almost 130 footnotes and 4 pages of sources.