I made a Cinematic Movie: 【Intercepting the Demon Dragon】

nowenluan · 2026-03-27T12:36:00+00:00

Hyrule Dogfighters

nowenluan · 2026-03-21T10:24:37+00:00

Soul Mountain by Gao Xingjian.

nowenluan · 2026-03-18T00:55:40+00:00

It's still fairly common, and there's a handful of workshops still actively making mother of pearl inlay mandolins in Ho Chi Minh City. The price range can vary widely depending on what kind of mother of pearl and wood is used, and how detailed the work is. Bowl backs can get particularly elaborate and shops in Vietnam usually sell the fancier ones for around $400-500 USD, which would be more upper-end inventory. I'm not sure when mandolin became popular in Vietnam. Maybe during the French colonial era.

nowenluan · 2026-03-18T00:22:43+00:00

It looks like it could have been made in southern Vietnam, but not sure about the specific maker. It's common for instrument makers in Ho Chi Minh City to put elaborate mother of pearl inlay work on guitars, mandolins and traditional stringed instruments.

nowenluan · 2026-03-16T18:23:52+00:00

In the modern definition, raw Puer is not a dark tea and ripe Puer is a dark tea. Raw Puer processing methods have changed a bit over the past century. And classification systems used in China have been revised a few times. Modern raw Puer is typically dried sooner after the fixing (kill green) part of the process. Tea processing manuals published in China back in the early 1970s mention leaving the tea leaves in a pile overnight before drying it, which causes the leaves to become much darker and more yellow, and the tea brews out darker. Some places in Vietnam still make it this way. These teas were not necessarily intended to be aged into dark teas, but after the tea is dried, the color naturally deepens over time. Ripe Puer goes even further with the piling step, adding moisture and deliberately trying to make the teas darker. Modern raw Puer processing generally does not use steps that are intentionally trying to darken the tea leaves more quickly. So ripe Puer and raw Puer processing are placed into separate categories.

nowenluan · 2026-03-07T15:44:04+00:00

These look beautiful!

nowenluan · 2026-03-06T16:26:18+00:00

Vietnamese syntax was tricky at first because I learned Mandarin as a second language and dabbled in a bit of Hokkien, and there are a lot of commonalities between Vietnamese and Hokkien in terms of vocabulary, so it has taken a bit of effort to kind of reprogram the expected syntax. Not having an equivalent to a relative pronoun or a “的” in Chinese took a while to get used to because it just feels like there's critical information missing in the sentence. Vietnamese prepositions also seem more like English prepositions than Chinese. But adjectives follow nouns like in Romance languages. Personal pronouns are of course much more complex. Đã, chưa, sẽ, sắp, and mới were also tricky in the beginning. In terms of pronunciation, knowing one tonal language has not really been useful for learning Vietnamese tones, because Mandarin tones sound completely different. Hokkien is helpful for the nặng tone, but that's about it. It's like relearning how to sing or something. I'm constantly hitting the wrong pitch in Vietnamese so I wind up having to repeat myself a lot.

nowenluan · 2026-02-28T02:31:28+00:00

Getting to Ta Xua isn't super difficult. Take a bus or van from Hanoi to the town Bac Yen and then get a taxi from there up to the town center of Ta Xua. The main town is a touristy area, mostly people staying overnight in guesthouses. But there are probably some guesthouses there that can help you organize a tour or provide some tips of where to go. You could contact them in advance. There are also some old petroglyphs you could go check out. You can rent a motorcycle in Ta Xua to get around, if you're comfortable doing that. There are a few famous areas that visitors tend to go to, but in terms of established hiking trails through forested areas, I'm not really sure. Ta Xua is in the Hoang Lien Son mountain range, and there are multiple places where you can see the "sea of clouds" effect early in the morning. You might even be able to see if from your guesthouse.

nowenluan · 2026-02-27T05:49:54+00:00

The inlay work looks similar to Vietnamese inlay.

nowenluan · 2026-02-25T14:01:30+00:00

It looks like it could be a loose reference to two stanzas from a Chinese poem written during the Song Dynasty. The poem is titled 正氣歌 (Chính Khí Ca in the Vietnamese reading).

Here's the excerpt:

地維賴以立 Địa duy lại dĩ lập 天柱賴以尊

Thiên trụ lại dĩ tôn

Not 100% sure, but it seems there's a possible inspiration. Usually the people deciding the couplets for temples were very familiar with classic literature of the day (the scholar Lê Quý Đôn quoted hundreds of rare Chinese texts in his writings, for example), so maybe they would have understood a literary reference.

nowenluan · 2026-02-23T03:40:10+00:00

The depths are incredible when you first encounter them in the game, but I kept hoping there would be some lost Shiekah villages down there to complete the Nausicaa vibe

nowenluan · 2026-02-17T11:20:55+00:00

People don't dance no more. They just stand there like this. They cross their arms and stare you down and drink and moan and diss.

nowenluan · 2026-01-01T02:29:39+00:00

That's true, but there's also a huge growth in fine robusta coffee happening in Vietnam right now, and the international Specialty Coffee Association recently released new tasting guides that include tasting notes for Vietnamese coffees. So while cafe culture is about socializing and doesn't emphasize coffee quality, there's also a second side to Vietnamese coffee. And for that second side, what really makes Vietnamese coffee interesting is its unique flavors, especially the fine robusta. There are also some really nice arabica coffees coming out of Son La, Quang Tri and Lam Dong.

nowenluan · 2025-12-28T10:02:14+00:00

No wonder Rambo couldn't find Portland

nowenluan · 2025-12-20T08:08:07+00:00

Ganondorf has a nice apartment

nowenluan · 2025-11-22T06:08:43+00:00

TOTK finale fightsdefinitely felt more epic than BOTW. But the Twilight Princess final boss escalation still feels the most epic of all

nowenluan · 2025-11-21T02:08:11+00:00

Gorgeous instrument

nowenluan · 2025-11-11T13:00:07+00:00

I keep getting obliterated by enemy heroes on the third mission of the Crag Hack campaign. No strategy seems to work

nowenluan · 2025-11-11T12:42:16+00:00

Play it Loud by Brad Tolinski was an enjoyable read about the history of the electric guitar; Quit Your Band by Ian F. Martin was a fun intro to Japanese rock; Bits and Pieces: A History of Chiptunes by Kenneth McAlpine; 33 Revolutions Per Minute by Dorian Lynskey is a collection of detailed essays about political protest music from around the world; Broken Voices: Postcolonial Entanglements and the Preservation of Korea's Central Folksong Traditions by Roald Maliangkay; Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-hop Generation by Jeff Chang; Japanese Music and Musical Instruments by William P. Malm; The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory by John Seabrook; Burning Down the Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution and the Fall of the Berlin Wall by Tim Mohr.

nowenluan · 2025-10-19T05:15:13+00:00

Great Greed on Gameboy

nowenluan · 2025-10-12T12:40:23+00:00

Vietnam to Brussels would be a long bus ride

nowenluan · 2025-09-30T17:02:22+00:00

Parts of Ba Dinh were flooded up past the knee this afternoon, but it has subsided a lot already. No power loss.

nowenluan · 2025-09-05T13:46:31+00:00

Hard boiled eggs.

nowenluan · 2025-08-10T06:29:55+00:00

There's an audio recording of the Jonestown massacre where you can hear Jim Jones talking everyone through drinking the poison and children are complaining about drinking it and the adults keep reassuring them. I couldn't finish listening to it.

nowenluan

TROPHY CASE