Brendan O’Kane
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bokane.org
Brendan O’Kane
@bokane.org
6.5K followers 3.4K following 13K posts
Scrutable Occidental, erstwhile 北漂, quondam translator, Ming and Qing fiction enjoyer, congenital Philadelphian. Shitposty sinology. Cynicism makes you an easy mark. Signal: @bokane.1644.

http://www.burninghou.se
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suspicious nyam
After several days of me feeding her, playing with her, cleaning her litterbox, attempting to purchase her affection with treats, &c., a feral little grey cat licks her paw non-nonchalantly — chalantly? — while attempting to turn me to stone out of the corner of her eye.
November 12, 2025 at 2:04 AM
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pov: you are on probation
a grey cat crouching on a kitchen floor pins you (a Stranger) with a wary look. the kibbles you fed her proved edible — apPARently — but you read way too much into that appreciative hiss and tried going in for friendly skritches, which was Fresh, and now you are trapped out on the thin, brittle ice of her regard.
November 8, 2025 at 6:11 PM
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good job everybody, night night
Gyoza, a ginger cat who has never heard of Andrew Cuomo, rests his head on my foot, preparing to drowse oh lawd he drowsin
November 5, 2025 at 3:52 AM
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still one of my favorite opening paragraphs
From John Crowley's 'The Solitudes': The Prologue in Heaven There were angels in the glass, two four six many of them, each one shuffling into his place in line like an alderman at the Lord Mayor's show. None was dressed in white; some wore fillets or wreaths of flowers and green leaves in their loose hair; all their eyes were strangely gay. They kept pressing in by one and two, always room for more, they linked arms or clasped their hands behind them, they looked out smiling at the two mortals who looked in at them. All their names began with A. —See! said one of the two men. Listen! -I see nothing, said the other, the elder of them, who had often spent fruitless hours alone before this very showstone, fruitless though he prepared himself with long prayer and intense concentration: I see nothing. I hear nothing. -Annael. And Annachor. And Anilos. And Agobel, said the younger man. God keep us and protect us from every harm.
November 4, 2025 at 4:27 PM
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i love drama
Screenshot of Pleco, probably a decade old at this point, with entries for the lexeme 豺 chái. The ABC Chinese-English Dictionary says "n. (zoo) - jackal." The Student's Dictionary of Classical and Medieval Chinese, which came out afterwards, has "dhole, Asian wild dog (Cuon alpinus); n.b. not a 'jackal'"
October 21, 2025 at 4:23 AM
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Not, of all possible incarnations, the worst.
Gyoza, a ginger boy with white cravat and socks, lazes on a footstool, regarding the camera with good-natured bewilderment
October 19, 2025 at 6:37 AM
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Go Birds Fuck ICE
October 18, 2025 at 5:30 PM
bokane.org
from the article: The Frog is the best thing to happen to American politics all year, but the fact that politics has devolved into Posting is ultimately a bad thing. As you can see in the grid of outcomes, the majority of the time, people are simply posting at each other instead of engaging with reality or solving collective action problems. The question of who wins or who loses in Triangle Posting Politics is divorced from material conditions, justice, or the common good.
October 11, 2025 at 6:46 PM
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pierogi agrees
pierogi (innocent)
October 5, 2025 at 2:59 PM
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some born good / some not even trying
Gyoza, a sweet ginger cat with white socks, looks down from on top of the record player with an air of friendly curiosity. He would love to hear all about whatever it is. Pierogi, an absence of virtue shaped like a small white cat with grey-brown Batman cowl, glowers from the armchair.
October 5, 2025 at 2:47 PM
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John DeFrancis:
page 1 of John DeFrancis' "In the Footsteps of Genghis Khan": We dodged warring armies by stealing twelve hundred miles down the bandit-infested Yellow River on an inflated sheepskin raft. You can't do that anymore. You can't repeat our thousand-mile camel trek across the Gobi Desert in the footsteps of Genghis Khan. You can't sit at a camel-dung campfire in the very heart of that huge desert and listen to a Mongol narrate how the Great Khan was castrated by a captured Tangut beauty he tried to take to bed. Neither can you visit the oasis, then one of the most remote places in the world, where we met a Mongol princess descended from survivors of the most horrendous mass migration in human history. Nor can you barge into the preserve of a churlish Muslim warlord and become a prisoner in his fortress town. There's lots more we did then that you can't do anymore, for a variety of reasons. For one thing, many areas of China that challenged the adventuresome in the good old bad old days were declared off-limits more than a half-century ago. Since then, the barriers have been removed (though sometimes replaced) in most of the country, including even Tibet, but not in the heart of the Gobi Desert, not in sensitive border areas, which have become even more inaccessible today than they were then. In recent years quite a few tourists have gotten to the fringes of that forbidden expanse. I have joined them, in my mind's eye, like a starveling out of Dickens gazing hollow-eyed into a bakeshop window. But even though the view from the outside is now obscured, it is still possible, for a discerning eye, to make out something of the veiled interior.
September 29, 2025 at 3:56 PM
bokane.org
搬興廢東生玉兔，
識榮枯西墜金烏。

Let fortune change, for good or ill;
The Jade Hare of the moon will still
Rise nightly from the east.
Whoever lost, whoever won,
It will not in the least
Detain the westering Gold Bird of the sun.

(Yuan dynasty lyric; anon., I think, that I was reminded of at the Met.)
Left-hand knob of Daoist ritual vessel: the Jade Hare Right-hand knob: the Gold Bird. 清 銅星斗紋天一山人丹壺 Daoist ritual vessel Qing dynasty (1644-1911), 17th-18th century Copper alloy Saint Louis Art Museum
September 28, 2025 at 9:11 PM
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“They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more. Hats and posters are available in the lobby!”
yr. correspondent, in a ‘Waiting for Godot’ baseball cap
September 28, 2025 at 1:34 PM
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nah, just above shoulder-level
old form of the phonophore in question
September 27, 2025 at 2:54 PM
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Well, here at the 葫蘆堂 in South Philadelphia, overlooking Passyunk Avenue, we’ve got free-flowing Red Bull and opinionated local cats
Gyoza sleeps off an intense morning workshop session Pierogi goes to the buffet
September 26, 2025 at 3:05 PM
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gardening
September 23, 2025 at 1:55 PM
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A photograph of a jigsaw puzzle based on the Dai Kan-Wa Jiten. “50,000 Kanji Characters,” says the box. Underneath, the headline: ‘AUTISM ANNOUNCEMENT’
September 22, 2025 at 10:13 PM
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bedtime
Pierogi, a white cat with patches of dark fur like a cow, who is looking kind of heavy from this angle, I’ll just say it, sleeps longly on a folding mattress. Next to him is Gyoza, a ginger cat in more of a croissant posture, also sleeping. They are almost nestled, not quite spooning, like closing quotation marks.
September 21, 2025 at 6:26 AM
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rediscovered today: eight and a half years of frog-boil
A screenshot of a Facebook status update from March 16, 2017: Higgledy-piggledy, Trump and his ghoul brigade, slashing the budget and gutting the state -- Big fans of warheads, but coprocephalically doubt that vaccines make America great. I posted this to Instagram on November 15, 2020, with the comment “An attempt at a double-dactyl from 2017, after they announced cuts to NIH in the budget. It hits pretty different now.” It hits very fucking different indeed now.
September 17, 2025 at 9:24 PM
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Classical Chinese for Councils of Eunuchs:
1: 上在殿上，據案而坐，目光矜莊，發言如鐘，謂將問計於宦官。 2: 於是「宦官」現身：乃三貓也乎，毛色各異，步趾從容；或側首而臥，神若倦鳥；或伸腰而踱，勢同閒雲；或凝然視天，若有所思。 3: 上顧而言曰：「渠堰之制，功關社稷；然群貓方閉精爽，唯相喵喵而已，孰能善策之哉？」
September 17, 2025 at 5:57 AM
bokane.org
Just put an egg in a tomato and you will be amazed
just put an egg in a tomato in an egg in a tomato in an egg in a tomato in an egg in a tomato in just a put an amaze a tomato in an egg
September 14, 2025 at 4:55 PM
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I think this might be a record
As of the time I screenshotted this, there were 911 quote-skeets, 1.8 thousand replies, 24 likes, and one reskeet, which is almost as brutal an ultima ratio as Charlie Kirk got
September 13, 2025 at 5:10 PM
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pierogi contemplates his breakfast sandwich
pierogi, who is not a dumpling but a cat, fixing with gimlet eye my breakfast sandwich and attempting to activate any latent telekinetic powers he may have
September 13, 2025 at 3:17 PM
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this idiot little gremlin is attempting to do Science (circling me and meowing in case there is some combination of sounds and angles that will make me forget I fed him already)
Gyoza, a handsome ginger himbo with white cravat, looking away from the camera as if he’s trying to figure out where that noise came from. (He is a cat.)
September 11, 2025 at 10:41 PM
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Autocorrection: iffy at the best of times, but what the fuck man
Google Docs (I know) underlining 'chairwoman' - Did I mean 'chairman?'
September 9, 2025 at 9:30 PM