cashew | Thursday, February 3rd, 2022

Went into Weibo to check if there's been any updates on Winter Olympics (because American media is losing their collective minds over this in a bad way; if only negative coverage of China is acceptable then that's hardly objective, is it?). Found this on the popular tags list:

What the...? What is even happening?

Meanwhile, oh man, I forgot that the opening ceremony's tomorrow. XD The ads for it is hilariously bad. I'll see if I can find rebroadcasts some other time. Not sure I'm going to bother looking for a live broadcast this time.

Edit: OMG, crossposting to IJ is back! Yay!!!!!

Edit2: So, I was curious why #2 trending on Weibo was 立春 (first day of spring), given that I thought the Chinese New Year is supposed to mark the start of spring, since its official name is Spring Festival (春节). Well, funny situation, because apparently in the olden days, the Spring Festival started on the first day of spring, but Sun Yat-sen changed the Spring Festival to the 1st day of the 1st month of the Chinese calendar rather than the first day of spring under the solar term.

And if you're wondering why the first day of the calendar doesn't correspond to the first day of spring, that's because the Chinese calendar is a lunisolar calendar that sort of but doesn't quite map onto the solar term. Rather than arithmetically deducing the dates (as the ancients have), the modern Chinese calendar uses the moon's current orbit in relation to Beijing's geographical location to determine the date. So it's a few days off from the solar term. Yay confusion!