Dune is a colossal book, not just by its influence on science fiction as a genre, but also its rich detail and underlying themes of survival, evolution, ecology, religion, politics, and power. For this it deserves credit, but as a story itself it failed to grip me. A minor obstacle was its pacing, often slow yet sometimes so fast across plot twist that I wondered if I accidentally skipped a page. But the biggest hurdle is that Dune feels highly cliche, which is ungrateful to say because I do realise this is the spaceship that launched all these science fiction typicalities, influencing the likes of Ender’s Game and Star Wars.
My first time in an airplane was in some Cessna 25 years ago. I had never imagined I’d ever sit in a plane, because that was something for rich people. But then after our visit to Legoland in Denmark, my dad decided we’d see the park from above. The whole was so inconceivable, not just […]
Sometimes a place or thing becomes super memorable not despite its odd name, but because of it. In Kunshan (昆山) there’s a place that sells ‘Toilet Egg Pancake’ (厕所蛋饼), because their original store was next to a public toilet. It has already moved on, but the name remains. While their pancakes are so good (and […]
My parents visited Shanghai for the first time in seven years, and even though the city has changed a lot, I dare say it has changed not as much as I have. Sure. On the surface of Shanghai, a lot of stores have come and gone since 2018, and large areas of the city were […]
I got the chance to travel from Shanghai to Taipei and back in one day. Rather impractical, very tiring, but still worth it. Because you could stay at home for ten weekends and watch fifty movies, and still not have as many impressions as this. I will refrain from acting as if now I know […]
