Juewang Shidai
絕望時代
"Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
About the Site (FAQ)
1. What's with the name? Jue-what?
The name is the Mandarin Chinese reading of the four characters
(絕望時代) you see below the title, which roughly translates to "Age of
Despair". Though for the official English name I went with "The
Hopeless Age".
I picked the characters in reference to the title of the manga Sayonara,
Zetsubou-sensei さよなら絶望先生, I just choose to use the Chinese
reading because I'm in Sinology and not Japanology, and because even
though I wanted to have a respectful nod towards the neurotic diary
of Kumeta Koji 久米田 康治
pretending to be a comedy manga, I didn't want to be too on the nose
and go too hard on attaching myself to it. Though in the end, I
still went with this because I think its neurotic style of obsessing
with minute details of culture and life are close to my heart and to
how I usually post and experience life.
(Though for articles dealing with Japan and Japanese topics, the
banner changes to "Zetsubou Jidai", the Japanese reading of the
phrase.)
So if you are worried about my mental state then please don't be.
The site is named in honour of the obsessive observations and
dialectic style of the manga, not its portrayal of suicide.
2. What's the purpose of this site?
Juewang Shidai is a companion platform to my Twitter
account. Twitter, subsequently X functions as a sort
of research diary for me when it comes to my projects. My hopes are
to post longer, expanded versions of threads I happen to do when the
opportunity arises.
Writing papers for university where I have to cite sources nearly
every line is very soul-crushing, so having a website where I
dictate editorial policy and standards is in essence a move for
liberating myself from that oppressive atmosphere.
As you can gather from this, there's no set schedule, style or
topic. Articles happen whenever.
(Tweets and threads happen almost constantly though.)
3. What topics does the site cover?
As the entryway says, mostly topics related to Asian culture. My
main research focus is ancient Chinese government and political
theory. (Even if using a word like "politics" in relation to Ancient
China is probably not the best idea. It's about governance. The
Hanfeizi is about governance. But I digress even within an FAQ.)
Besides my main research topic, I also semi-regularly dabble in the
translation of qiguai xiaoshuo 奇怪小說, though because a
considerable amount of my translation output as of right now is into
Hungarian, these don't always get posted online.
I also waste considerable amounts of my efforts on Japanese popular
culture and then attempting to relate it back to ancient Chinese
philosophy.
Basically the site covers whatever asinine topic related to Asia
happens to fan the fire of mania inside of me during a given time
period.
4. You mentioned an old blog, why move to here from Blogger?
Neocities gives me much more structural freedom, even if that
structural freedom comes with the downside of the site reflecting my
very, very, very limited abilities with webdesign with HTML.
Still it looks close to how I'd have imagined a website for me than
Blogger ever has. Not to mention making a page here doesn't give me
an aneurysm.
Oh, while on the topic: I made Juewang Shidai with SeaMonkey
Composer and webdesign knowledge I managed not to forget since
the time I've learned it in high school almost a decade ago.
Well, that's it for now. If the need arises, I'll expand the FAQ
more.
Click the image below to return to the Main Page:
