{ "version": "https://jsonfeed.org/version/1", "title": "Tall Tales, Short Stories & Modest Musings", "description": "", "home_page_url": "https://blog.byjasonli.com", "feed_url": "https://blog.byjasonli.com/feed.json", "user_comment": "", "author": { "name": "Jason Li" }, "items": [ { "id": "https://blog.byjasonli.com/finding-a-budget-conscious-substack-alternative-what-im-using-in-2026/", "url": "https://blog.byjasonli.com/finding-a-budget-conscious-substack-alternative-what-im-using-in-2026/", "title": "Finding a budget-conscious Substack alternative (what I'm using in 2026)", "summary": "Almost everyone around me uses Substack as their newsletter platform of choice. I get it. The user experience is sleek, its free tier allows for unlimited subscribers, and it feels like the cool platform to use. Friends will declare that they're starting a \"Substack\" and everyone automatically understands that this…", "content_html": "
\"A
\n

Almost everyone around me uses Substack as their newsletter platform of choice. I get it. The user experience is sleek, its free tier allows for unlimited subscribers, and it feels like the cool platform to use. Friends will declare that they're starting a \"Substack\" and everyone automatically understands that this means a personal (blog-like but not marketing) newsletter. But for some of us, Substack has become cringe. Maybe it's the company’s content moderation policies and its history of data breaches. Or maybe it's the way the platform aggressive pushes its social media network features. Either way, some of us are on a hunt for alternatives.

\n

Why I'm writing this: While I was researching newsletter platforms for my own projects this year, I didn't find any articles with a thorough breakdown of options, and people on social media who are critical of Substack usually just complain without constructively offering alternatives.

\n

If you're willing to spend a bit of money

\n
\"Two
\n

Buttondown is my current favorite platform for a straightforward, well-designed newsletter platform. It has sensible defaults, easy-to-navigate menus, and does a good job of getting out of the way when I want to just write the next issue of the newsletter. Plus, Buttondown is a small company that's not venture capital funded, which means it's not trying to upsell you constantly or sell your (and your readers') data. Its privacy policy is much more \"private\" than that of Substack, and pledges 10% of its profits to fighting climate change.

\n

I use Buttondown for my own personal newsletter. My personal favorite feature is its support for copy-and-paste images. The main downside for me is that its free tier only extends to 100 subscribers; anything beyond incurs a low monthly fee.

\n

If you want a free platform

\n

Things get a little more complicated for free platforms, which I learned when I was trying to pick a platform for two group projects I'm involved with. Neither are well funded, so we are trying to cut costs as much we can. For now, that means a platform that would comfortably accommodate 200 subscribers or more without slapping us with a bill.

\n

Beehiiv is probably the closest competitor to Substack and it was my initial choice. Like Substack, Beehiiv is a popular venture-funded tech platform with a slick interface, numerous features (website builder, podcast hosting, etc.) and an internal referral/recommendation system to boost your subscriber base. Most importantly, its free tier allows for up to 2500 subscribers. Several artists and journalists I follow are happy users of Beehiiv. In the case of my group project, Beehiiv rejected me before I had a chance to try it because they rejected our Protonmail email address during the sign up process.

\n
\"Two
\n

After some research, I came across my current pick for a newsletter platform with a generous free tier: EmailOctopus. Like Buttondown, they are a small business (not venture capital fueled), have a straightforward product/design, and advertise their giving back and doing good initiatives. Their newsletter writing/editing interface is clunkier to use than Buttondown or Substack's but that's a small price to pay given that their free tier allows up to 2500 subscribers.

\n

Plus, their domain isn't automatically blocked by my web browser's privacy extension (uBlock Origin), which is not something I can say of some of the other bigger platforms. On these platforms, I wasn't able to use the sign up form (or \"landing page\") hosted on their website because it was automatically blocked.

\n

Platforms flagged by my privacy extension

\n
\"A
\n

I have uBlock Origin installed on my laptop's web browser, which \"blocks ads, trackers, coin miners, popups, annoying anti-blockers, malware sites, etc.\" uBlock Origin is open source and comes highly recommended by experts in the privacy and tech space, so I have it set up with its default set of filter/block lists. I rarely ever have to add websites to the Trusted sites section of the extension to bypass it, so I was surprised to learn that it was blocking some of the bigger newsletter platforms.

\n

After looking into this issue further, I realized that for most newsletter platforms, uBlock Origin simply blocks the specific domains/subdomains that are tracking or collecting data about you, leaving the rest of the website perfectly functional. In select cases though, uBlock Origin also blocks the domains/subdomains used in the sign up forms. For example, I checked the following newsletter platforms to see whether or not their embed forms would be blocked by uBlock Origin's default filter lists:

\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
Platform nameFree subscriber limitSign up form blocked by filter lists?
Substack♾️ 
Buttondown100 
Beehiiv2500 
EmailOctopus2500 
AWeber 500 
Brevo2000 (but only 300 emails perday allowed) 
Cakemail500 
Campaign Monitor❌ 
Constant Contact❌ 
Drip❌🛑
EcoSend250 
GetResponse500 
Ghost❌ 
Kit10,000🛑
Klaviyo250🛑
Mailchimp250 
MailerLite250 
Patreon♾️ 
\n

About the data in this table:

\n\n

Other use cases

\n

If you've made it this far, you probably realize that I'm only focusing on a specific use case: someone who wants an email newsletter platform for personal writing, life updates or organizational announcements. Use cases that fall outside this purview include:

\n\n

The platforms I'm recommending here may still be useful for these use cases, but their mileage will vary depending on what you're looking to do specifically.

\n
\n

If you're looking for an easy-to-use platform for your personal newsletter though, give  Buttondown or EmailOctopus a try before following the herd on Substack. Wouldn't you rather support a small business with commitments to doing good rather than a venture-funded tech company whose long-term investor recently doubled down on AI and defense? Plus, both platforms have real human faces and names on their about/team page, whereas Substack's only has a sales pitch about making money along with a few featured customers.

", "image": "https://blog.byjasonli.com/media/posts/37/nosubstack-2.png", "author": { "name": "Jason Li" }, "tags": [ "research", "guide" ], "date_published": "2026-07-31T12:10:00-04:00", "date_modified": "2026-07-31T13:27:36-04:00" }, { "id": "https://blog.byjasonli.com/a-look-back-at-the-first-ever-world-webtoon-festival/", "url": "https://blog.byjasonli.com/a-look-back-at-the-first-ever-world-webtoon-festival/", "title": "A Look Back at the First-Ever World Webtoon Festival", "summary": "The inaugural World Webtoon Festival opened its doors in Seoul last fall, in the fashionable neighborhood of Seongsu-dong from the 26th to the 29th of September 2024. Collaboratively organized/hosted by four major government bodies—the Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism, the Seoul Metropolitan Government, the Korea Creative Content Agency (KOCCA),…", "content_html": "
\"Visitors

The inaugural World Webtoon Festival opened its doors in Seoul last fall, in the fashionable neighborhood of Seongsu-dong from the 26th to the 29th of September 2024. Collaboratively organized/hosted by four major government bodies—the Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism, the Seoul Metropolitan Government, the Korea Creative Content Agency (KOCCA), and the Seoul Business Agency—the event was devoted to promoting webtoons as a unique medium and profitable enterprise. In this context, webtoons refer to vertically-scrolling comics that are optimized for smartphones and usually serialized through apps that paywall new releases for a short time. To boost the medium, the festival hosted lavish merch pavilions from popular Korean webtoons, tech demos from local tech giants Kakao and Naver, talks by industry professionals, and the newly-minted World Webtoons Awards.

The festival is meant to be an prestigious global event for the webtoon medium, with government spokespeople calling it the Cannes Film Festival but for webtoons. Yet despite its broad offering and wide array of backers, the first year of the festival fell short of its purported international goals. Operationally, the event was conducted almost entirely in Korean (there wasn’t even a basic English language website), and aside from a token award to a foreign webtoon artist, webtoons from outside of South Korea were noticeably absent. Externally, the event barely garnished any English-language press.

Yet I do believe the World Webtoon Festival deserves more attention from the international community. First of all, its first run was still a domestic success: local webtoon fans flocked to see their favorite series, merchandise was often sold out, and entourages of business people came and went. Secondly, while it might not have been a truly global festival in its first year, it’s likely festival organizers will scale up their ambitions in the years to come. So to make up for the lack of international exposure, I’m sharing my observations (and photos) from the two days I spent at the festival.

Webtoon booths and pavilions

\n

The bulk of the festival was housed in a converted multi-story factory building which housed webtoon booths, tech demo areas, a Wacom-sponsored drawing contest, and a stage for the awards. One thing that was apparent upon entry into the main building is this festival was a showcase and celebration of the successful, higher budget webtoons. Studios and publishers were operating booths, not artists, and there was no artists’ alley for up-and-coming talent.

\"Wayfinding
\"The
\"Farther
\"Also

But these booths are not only promoting their webtoons, they are using this opportunity to sell webtoon-related merch.

\"The
\"Upstairs,

Flanking the main building were smaller standalone buildings that housed one webtoon studio each.

\"Large
\"Inside
\"And
\"Another
\"Inside,

Industry presence and tech demos

\n

In parallel to the booths from webtoon studios and publishers that cater to a comics-reading public, there was also a steady industry presence throughout the festival. When I stopped by on the first day I occasionally saw small groups of people in business attire who, on more than one occasion, were leading an older executive around through the various booths. Within the three-day lineup of talks, there was one standout industry panel on “K-Webtoons in the Spotlight of Hollywood.”

A few industry bodies had their own booths as well, such as the Korean Manhwa Contents Agency (KOMACON) and the SangSangBiz Academy. The map below was on display at KOMACON’s booth: the green and yellow icons stand for Naver Webtoon and Kakao Page respectively, and together they show the dominance of South Korean webtoon platforms across the world.

\"A

Meanwhile, both big tech platforms, Naver Webtoon and Kakao Page, built out large eye-catching booths at the festival, though they were devoted to demonstrating their latest technology—a stark reminder that webtoons is both a format for comics and also a type of tech platform. South Korea’s culture minister has, after all, gone on record about building a “Netflix of webtoons” platform.

Naver advertised AI features that are built into its Webtoon app: 1) Character Chat, which allows readers to text chat with a select number of webtoon characters (chat engine powered by Naver’s HyperCLOVA X AI model), and 2) Toon Filter, where you pay a small fee to have your selfie transformed via AI into a caricature in a chosen cartoonist’s style.

\"A
\"Another

Not to be left behind, Kakao built out a roomy back area with black walls and a multitude of screens to show off its ALIVE brand of webtoon technologies. The central showpiece was a flashy multi-screen animation:

\"A

Phones on the side were loaded with demos of the ALIVE viewer, which adds animation, page transitions and sound to the webtoon as you scroll:

\"A

Though Naver and Kakao weren’t the only ones with tech demos. My personal favorite was a caricature-drawing robot made by XORBIS, an exhibit design company. Its name is SketcherX, and it is an AI-powered live-caricature robot, which has a movable head that turns to look at the target and eyes that blink.

\"A

World Webtoons Awards

\n

Then of course there was the ceremony for the first edition of the World Webtoons Awards. Among the dozen or so prizes, the biggest honor and grand prize went to Solo Leveling—a victory lap for the local industry since the massively popular webtoon series wrapped in 2021 (though its sequel and animated adaptations are still ongoing). Given that the awards were celebrating past success however, I would’ve expected the overseas award to go to the three-time Eisner winner Lore Olympus (written and illustrated by Rachel Smythe). Instead, the inaugural international award went to Tomahawk Angel (written and illustrated by Odysseas Theodoratos), an ongoing post-apocalyptic horror-action series.

\"Odysseas

Final thoughts

\n

South Korea is keen to stake its claim to the webtoon format, and this festival is one of the major efforts by the government to boost this effort. As Variety reported early in 2024, webtoons is a big cultural export for the country, and is a burgeoning though lesser-known part of the global K-wave phenomenon. In spite of what the press releases might have us believe, the World Webtoon Festival is actually not the first major international webtoon festival in South Korea—the Busan Global Webtoon Festival was held for the eight time in 2024, though it too hasn’t made any headlines in the international, English-language sphere either. (Granted, the Busan festival’s government backers and organizers are admittedly much smaller regional players.) Only time will tell if either festival will grow into a prestigious, globally recognized and attended event, but given the country’s devotion to the webtoons medium, I’d be willing to bet that the future Cannes for webtoons will make its home in South Korea in some shape or form.

\n

A version of this article was originally published on the Cartoonist Cooperative Journal.

", "author": { "name": "Jason Li" }, "tags": [ "research" ], "date_published": "2025-05-28T17:24:00-04:00", "date_modified": "2025-12-10T18:49:12-05:00" }, { "id": "https://blog.byjasonli.com/inventing-a-graphic-design-system-that-includes-mandarin-and-cantonese-traditional-and-simplified-chinese/", "url": "https://blog.byjasonli.com/inventing-a-graphic-design-system-that-includes-mandarin-and-cantonese-traditional-and-simplified-chinese/", "title": "Inventing a graphic design system that includes Mandarin and Cantonese, Traditional and Simplified Chinese", "summary": "When the three of us (Jason Li, An Xiao Mina and Jennifer 8. Lee) came together to write The Hanmoji Handbook: Your Guide to the Chinese Language Through Emoji, we challenged ourselves to do better in representing the rich diversity of the Chinese language. Most books today simply choose one…", "content_html": "
\"A

When the three of us (Jason Li, An Xiao Mina and Jennifer 8. Lee) came together to write The Hanmoji Handbook: Your Guide to the Chinese Language Through Emoji, we challenged ourselves to do better in representing the rich diversity of the Chinese language. Most books today simply choose one form of Chinese — usually Simplified Chinese characters with Mandarin Pinyin — and presents that as the one and only form of Chinese. This unfortunate presentation overlooks the linguistic diversity of the Sinophone world, including the hundreds of ways Chinese is spoken and the dual written standards of Traditional and Simplified Chinese. Even within our author team, we didn’t share the same preferred written or spoken form, so it never made sense to force ourselves to pick one of each.

While it would be impossible to cover the full breadth of the Chinese language, we were able to draw upon the expertise of all three co-authors to create a design system that includes two written standards (Traditional and Simplified) and two spoken forms (Mandarin and Cantonese by way of Pinyin and Jyutping respectively). This two by two system accompanies almost every instance of Chinese in our book. While this system is already a significant innovation in the publishing world, we acknowledge we were only able to capture a small fraction of the many expressions of Chinese, and hope others will be inspired to build upon our work to create future systems that encompass an even wider range of the language.

Finally, we come to the design system itself. Here’s a page from our book showing what we came up to show both Traditional and Simplified Chinese simultaneously alongside pronunciation guides in Mandarin and Cantonese:

\"Page

Explaining our design system

\n

As the only graphic designer among the three of us, I was tasked with making the first drafts of the above system. To do that, I followed the rubric that our eyes parse multiple, discrete things on a page (or screen) better if they look different, preferably in a clear visual hierarchy where one thing is bigger or bolder than the other. As you can see in the final result, this method of visual differentiation persisted through to the final design, after being workshopped with my two co-authors and through further enhancements by the design team at MITeen/Candlewick Press (h/t Vera Villanueva and Nancy Brennan).

But beyond simply making things bigger or bolder, there are specific reasons why we made some parts bigger or bolder than others:

\n
\"A

A derivative design system for paragraph text

\n

Sometimes, we also had to refer to Chinese characters in the text of a paragraph, where we didn’t have room to lay everything out using our full design system above. In those cases, we went with a shorthand of simply placing the Traditional Chinese character(s) before the Simplified one(s) with a forward slash (/), followed by the pronunciation in Mandarin and Cantonese in italics, with another forward slash separating the two. Here are two examples of what this looked like in our book:

\n

In cases where the Traditional and Simplified Chinese characters are one and the same, we only show the character once as shown in the following example:

\n

In our earlier drafts, we wrote only what we intuitively felt was necessary in the context of the sentence (e.g. the written Chinese character by itself or only the pronunciation in one spoken language). But our editors at MITeen/Candlewick (h/t Olivia Swomley) were quick to point out that laying out all of the forms consistently and exhaustively would be the best option for readers, especially since they will already be used to the other design system where everything is included.

Borrow & remix our design system!

\n

Graphic design systems can (and should) not be copyrighted or patented, so feel free to borrow or remix our design system. Maybe your textbook prioritizes Cantonese over Mandarin, or requires the addition of a third spoken language. Maybe your children’s book only uses Traditional Chinese characters but still wants to retain pronunciation guides for Mandarin and Cantonese. We highly encourage everyone to invent design systems of their own and most importantly, to break free of the idea that only one written script and spoken language can “fit” into the confines of a book.

", "author": { "name": "Jason Li" }, "tags": [ "show and tell", "guide" ], "date_published": "2024-10-29T17:05:55-04:00", "date_modified": "2024-10-29T17:09:34-04:00" }, { "id": "https://blog.byjasonli.com/digitally-typesetting-rare-ancient-and-esoteric-chinese-characters/", "url": "https://blog.byjasonli.com/digitally-typesetting-rare-ancient-and-esoteric-chinese-characters/", "title": "Digitally Typesetting Rare, Ancient and Esoteric Chinese Characters", "summary": "The short answer Install the BabelStone Han font, which supports “57,000 Han characters… [and] includes many rare or archaic characters that are not found in most CJK fonts” on your computer. Then look up the character on Unicode’s Unihan Database Lookup website (using the Stroke-Radical Index) and copy-and-paste it from…", "content_html": "

The short answer

\n

Install the BabelStone Han font, which supports “57,000 Han characters… [and] includes many rare or archaic characters that are not found in most CJK fonts” on your computer. Then look up the character on Unicode’s Unihan Database Lookup website (using the Stroke-Radical Index) and copy-and-paste it from there.

Update: Andrew West, the maintainer of BabelStone Han font, wrote in and pointed out that it is quicker to find the character by opening BabelStone Han’s IDS (Ideographic Description Sequences) text file in a web browser or text editor, and running a search using the type-able parts of the character.

How we got here: the back story

\n

I met scholar and translator Clement Tong at the Translating Hong Kong 2 symposium recently, and he had a pressing request for the designers in the room. He wanted us to find a way to make it possible to typeset (i.e. type and print) a set of very rare, but historically significant, Chinese characters. These esoteric characters appear in his research on the earliest Chinese-language Bibles, which, as his article in Christianity Today points out, date back to the early 18th and 19th centuries.

As a designer, I knew that the answer to his request actually consists of two parts:

    \n
  1. Is there a Unicode code point for these characters? I.e. is there a piece of computer code that allows the seldomly-used Chinese characters to be typed (or, more likely than not, copied-and-pasted like a symbol)?
    2. \n
  2. If so, is there a font that will display these characters? I.e. is there a Chinese font with a wide-enough character set that will display the seldomly-used character?
    3. \n
\n

I asked Clement for a sample of some characters that he had been, until now, unable to typeset, and he sent me the following examples (also from the Christianity Today article):

\n

They are written with square brackets to indicate that the two characters are supposed to be combined into one. For example, using this notation, the character for the sound of laughter, 哈, would be written as [口合].

How we got here: the answer explained

\n

The first thing I did was download the BabelStone Han font, “a free Unicode CJK font with over 57,000 Han characters (hanzi, kanji, hanja), and 62,061 Unicode characters in total… includes many rare or archaic characters that are not found in most CJK fonts, as well as many characters used for the scholarly transcription of Early Chinese texts written on bone, bronze, wood, bamboo, and silk.” The font is free courtesy of BabelStone, who are building on top of previous work done by Taiwanese type foundry Arphic.

Then I installed the font on my computer. (Here are the instructions for macOS and Windows 10/11.) I didn’t bother trying to install them on my mobile devices, since that process requires complicated third-party apps. With the font installed, my computer was now able to display many more Chinese characters.

To test the new font, and to look for our characters, I went to Unicode’s Unihan Database Lookup website. I clicked on the site’s Radical-Stroke Index. I started by looking up the first of Clement’s requested characters: [口撒]. It’s written with a 口 radical, which takes three strokes to write, and I navigated to the corresponding Radical-Stroke Index for radical #30 (mouth) 口. Then I counted the number of strokes in the rest of the character, 撒, which is 15. I scrolled down to look for it.

Before installing the font, this is what the search results look like – the square blocks with random letters inside indicate that my computer can’t find a corresponding font to display that character:

\"The

Aftering installing the font, most of the square blocks become legible Chinese characters:

\"The

I eventually located [口撒] in the middle of the fifth row. I clicked on it to land on the page on Unicode for [口撒]. There I could easily select the character to copy-and-paste into whatever documents I needed. I quickly fired up Adobe Illustrator to paste the characters in and enlarged them to show Clement.

I went through the same sequence of lookup, copy and paste for the remaining two characters. Here are the three characters Clement asked me about, rendered with the BabelStone Han font:

\"Image

Update: As we mentioned at the beginning of the article, one quicker alternative to looking up the character on Unicode’s website is to look within BabelStone Han’s IDS (Ideographic Description Sequences) text file. In the case of the first example, all you have to do is open the file in a web browser or text editor and search directly for “口撒” to locate the character.

How we got here: caveats

\n

Two things to keep in mind about this process:

    \n
  1. If you copy and paste these esoteric characters onto a website or Word/Google Doc document, the characters will only show up if the person viewing it has the BabelStone Han font installed. Luckily, they will show up if you export a document into a PDF or print a physical copy.
    2. \n
  2. For many of these esoteric characters, the only font that supports them is the Babelstone Han font, which means that they will follow its visual design as a “Song/Ming style (宋体/明體) font, with glyphs modeled on the official character forms used in the People’s Republic of China.” More font options may open up in the future, but no other font I found today works on these rare historical characters, including the expansive Source Han and Noto projects by Adobe, Google and partners
    3. \n
\n
\n

This article was first cross-posted to both 88 Bar.

", "author": { "name": "Jason Li" }, "tags": [ "research", "guide" ], "date_published": "2024-03-12T18:27:00-04:00", "date_modified": "2024-12-18T18:31:38-05:00" }, { "id": "https://blog.byjasonli.com/verified-the-hanmoji-handbook-is-the-first-traditionally-published-childrens-book-with-cantonesejyutping/", "url": "https://blog.byjasonli.com/verified-the-hanmoji-handbook-is-the-first-traditionally-published-childrens-book-with-cantonesejyutping/", "title": "Verified: The Hanmoji Handbook is the first “traditionally published” children’s book with Cantonese/Jyutping", "summary": "Last month, I ran a special pre-order with the team at Little Kozzi for the launch of the paperback edition of The Hanmoji Handbook: Your Guide to the Chinese Language Through Emoji (which I co-authored with An Xiao Mina and Jennifer 8. Lee). On their blog post announcing the pre-order,…", "content_html": "
\"A

Last month, I ran a special pre-order with the team at Little Kozzi for the launch of the paperback edition  of The Hanmoji Handbook: Your Guide to the Chinese Language Through Emoji (which I co-authored with An Xiao Mina and Jennifer 8. Lee). On their blog post announcing the pre-order, Little Kozzi suggested that:

\n

This book immediately stood out to me because it’s the first traditionally published book (that I’m aware of) that includes: 1) Traditional Chinese characters, AND 2) Cantonese pronunciation + Jyutping (!!) There are a lot more books out there these days with Jyupting, but most (if not all) are self-published.

\n

[In case you’re not familiar with Cantonese learning, Jyutping (粵拼) is most commonly-used Latin alphabet pronunciation system for Cantonese these days.]

Could this be true? Yes, but… One additional piece of context that’s implied in Little Kozzi’s post, but is not obvious unless you visit their website, is that they are an online Chinese children’s bookseller, so in their blog post they are only talking about children’s books. So within the realm of children’s books published by large publishers in the US, UK and Canada, I’m 99% sure this is actually true.

By scouring online booksellers, publisher websites and Google Books, I have verified that:

\n

The rest of this post is a summary of how I verified these two claims, in case you’re skeptical or simply curious. Given the volume of mainstream publishing in the US/UK/Canada, it’s not possible for me to be 100% sure about these claims… but I’m glad we got 99% of the way there.

\n

How I looked for data

\n

By running a keyword search for  “Cantonese” on online bookstores and publisher websites:

\n

I also looked on Google Books, which indexes the insides of a book, which means that it might find things that a simple bookstore listing won’t have:

\n

Of the book results I got:

\n
\n

What I found: adult language learning books

\n\n
\n

What I found: children’s books

\n\n
\n

What I found: access to Cantonese children’s books is growing

\n

Though it might seem like our book has a clear advantage by being published by a larger press, the reality is that most of the recently-published Cantonese children’s books do have quite a wide distribution network as well. Their titles and covers came up again and again when I was looking  through big online bookstores — which means that they too are ready and available for order. The democratization of publishing is actually happening, at least when it comes to Cantonese children’s books.

", "author": { "name": "Jason Li" }, "tags": [ "show and tell" ], "date_published": "2023-12-13T16:55:08-05:00", "date_modified": "2023-12-13T17:08:23-05:00" }, { "id": "https://blog.byjasonli.com/reviewed-voxel-drawing-apps-for-ios-all-of-them/", "url": "https://blog.byjasonli.com/reviewed-voxel-drawing-apps-for-ios-all-of-them/", "title": "Reviewed: voxel drawing apps for iPad (all of them!)", "summary": "What are voxels? In the context of 3D modeling and illustration, voxels are basically 3D pixels. So voxel art is like the 3D version of pixel art — artists create the model one cube (rather than one square) at a time, in a three-dimensional box. It’s a style of 3D…", "content_html": "
\"A

What are voxels?

\n

In the context of 3D modeling and illustration, voxels are basically 3D pixels. So voxel art is like the 3D version of pixel art — artists create the model one cube (rather than one square) at a time, in a three-dimensional box. It’s a style of 3D art that’s been popularized by games like Minecraft and mobile games like Crossy Road (shown below respectively).

\"Two

Why drawing them on a touch screen is the way to go

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One of my pet peeves with 3D modeling on my computer is that the mouse is a very poor controller for shifting camera angles and moving the viewport around. It always feels very counterintuitive to be pawing at my table to move around a 3D space, and pressing this or that button to change the way the viewpoint moves. Compared to this, I find that moving a camera around on a touchscreen with my fingers is much more intuitive and allows for a fidelity of movement that I can’t easily perform on a computer mouse. (One solution could be to use a trackpad on a computer. While it is better in some respects, it’s still not as intuitive. Plus, 3D modeling applications often assume the use of a mouse and leverages right clicks and scroll-wheels.)

I tried all four voxel drawing apps available on iPad (iOS) today and here’s what I found out

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Turns out there are only four voxel modeling/drawing apps for the iPad (iOS) right now, though there are barely any reviews online on how they stack up against one another. So I took a bit of time out to download them all and try them out so you won’t have to 😉. Note that I did all of my testing on my iPad, so I don’t know 100% how the experience scales down on an iPhone, which many of these apps also support. (All prices below are given in US dollars.)

⭐️⭐️⭐️ Voxel Max - 3D Modeling ($9.99)

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Voxel Max is my top choice for a voxel drawing app on the iPad. Developed by UAE-based developer and Adrian Andreca, it has a rich set of features (multiple objects in multiple layers, different coloring styles, three rendering styles with a dozen or so effects) and is intuitive to navigate on the iPad. Its minimalist interface is beautiful, though some of the more complex features are a little hit-or-miss in terms of being easy to use. I also really like that I can rotate voxel objects within a scene, so that the model is not 100% strictly in a voxel grid, but retains the aesthetic nonetheless.

⭐️ ⭐️ Goxel 3D Voxel Editor ($4.99)

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Goxel is an open source voxel editor for PC/Mac/Linux created by the Taipei-based developer Guillaume Chéreau. The iOS app is based on the same code base as the computer application of the same name. I really wanted to like Goxel because it’s an open source project that has been around for 7+ years. Unfortunately because Goxel is primarily designed for computer-and-mouse use, it still retains a control schema that’s unintuitive on a touch screen — tilting the camera up and down is controlled using a scroll bar on the side, rather than with simple touch screen gestures. If you can get over that though, it does have the richest feature set (multiple cameras, materials, layers as well as add/subtract drawing tools) of the four apps.

⭐️ ⭐️ Mega Voxel (ad-supported or $4.99 per month)

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Mega Voxel by Go Real Games, LLC sports a very toy-like design, which made it very appealing at first. I highly recommend downloading it and opening it to play through the (free) tutorial as an introduction to voxel drawing. However, once I spent more time with it, the app doesn’t have as many features as Voxel Max or Goxel, and its design is optimized for creating objects to place alongisde or within other objects, creatures and landscapes that are availble on their online shop. Of course, most of the shop is only unlocked if you pay for the monthly subscription, which is quite steep in price compared to the other apps reviewed.

⭐️ Particubes (free!)

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Particubes by Voxowl Inc. is a legacy app from a development studio that’s moved on — in fact, there’s a pop-up advertising the new app every time you open the app. Its feature set is basic and the displayed models aren’t particularly beautifully-rendered. However, the app is very fast and snappy, which means it probably runs well on iPhones.

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TL;DR: I recommend getting Voxel Max because it’s a beautiful app that has intuitive controls and a rich feature set.

Are there any other iPad/iOS voxel drawing apps I missed? Let me know!

", "author": { "name": "Jason Li" }, "tags": [ "review" ], "date_published": "2023-08-17T20:10:04-04:00", "date_modified": "2023-08-18T12:49:27-04:00" }, { "id": "https://blog.byjasonli.com/there-is-more-than-one-chinese-language-dictionaries-for-cantonese-teochew-toisanese-shanghainese-and-more/", "url": "https://blog.byjasonli.com/there-is-more-than-one-chinese-language-dictionaries-for-cantonese-teochew-toisanese-shanghainese-and-more/", "title": "There Is More Than One Chinese Language: Dictionaries for Cantonese, Teochew, Toisanese, Shanghainese, and more!", "summary": "As we say in The Hanmoji Handbook, “Here’s the thing about spoken Chinese: it refers to many different languages — dozens, in fact — used by people in various parts of China, today and throughout history.” So when we discovered that the United Nations created an official, singular Chinese Language…", "content_html": "
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As we say in The Hanmoji Handbook, “Here’s the thing about spoken Chinese: it refers to many different languages — dozens, in fact — used by people in various parts of China, today and throughout history.” So when we discovered that the United Nations created an official, singular Chinese Language Day (celebrated annually on 4/20 of all days), we were a little perplexed. But here’s an idea for next year: let’s call it Chinese Languages Day instead, and use the event to highlight the plurality of Chinese expression around the world.

To that end, we wanted to share the hard-to-find resources that enabled us to show the breadth of spoken Chinese in our book: the online dictionaries for the regional, non-official languages of China and its diaspora. These spoken languages are increasingly sidelined in the recent standardization and nationalization of Mandarin, as Oiwan Lam notes in Global Voices. Keep in mind, though, that the standardization of written Chinese started millennia earlier than the spoken form, so all of these non-Mandarin languages are still written with either Simplified or Traditional Chinese characters. There are some variations in specific words and phrases chosen for written expression, especially in colloquial, but for the most part, the written script is the same. These dictionaries can help us understand the nuances and variations.

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Cantonese dictionaries

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Pleco ⭐️

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Our favorite go-to when it comes to looking up Cantonese words is definitely the Pleco mobile app. Pleco is a tried-and-true powerhouse for your Chinese learning needs. At its core, it’s a Chinese-to-English dictionary, but it also sports features for flashcard memorization and OCR (optical character recognition) document reading. Most importantly, it ships with Cantonese support that can be easily turned on, along with add-ons (both free and paid) that bolster its Cantonese vocabulary. For more details on how to use Pleco for Cantonese, check out Cantoblog’s How to make Pleco into a Cantonese power tool.

MDBG Chinese Dictionary

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As a backup, and when we’re only on our computers, the MDBG Chinese Dictionary’s character lookup tool also includes results in Cantonese, though its breadth of entries pales in comparison to Pleco’s add-on dictionaries. The MDBG dictionary is based around a public-use, Creative Commons licensed Chinese-to-English dictionary (first created in 1997), which is why it is a free and powerful resource.

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Teochew/Chaozhou dictionaries

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潮州·母语 (Chaozhou Mogher)⭐

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潮州·母语 (Chaozhou Mogher) is an online resource with depth and history — its website includes both dictionary functionality as well as word lists, a radicals index and a guide to Teochew tones.

 

潮州音字典 czyzd.com

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潮州音字典 (czyzd.com) comes in both mobile app and website form. The iOS mobile app is available on the Apple App Store, though the Android version only comes via a download-at-your-own-risk file on their website. Their website on the other hand, is accessible to all, though it unfortunately runs through an unencrypted HTTP connection.

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Taishanese/Toisanese dictionaries

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Taishanese Language Home 台山话资源网 ⭐️

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Taishanese Language Home 台山话资源网 is “a searchable database with audio pronunciation intended for general usage as well as to facilitate linguistics research.” This Chinese-to-English dictionary (with audio clips for pronunciation) is a work-in-progress. Its creator, Stephen Li, also runs a blog called Toisanese Chop Suey 台山话杂碎: A Tribute to My Mother Tongue.

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Wu language group dictionary (includes Shanghainese and Suzhounese)

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吳語學堂 ⭐️

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Format: Website

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吳語學堂 [Wu Language Academy] is an expansive resource that’s working to capture an entire language group under one roof. It might not have as many features (or audio clips) as some of the other dictionaries, but its breadth of coverage, as shown in the screenshotted map above, is an astounding achievement all on its own.

Wiktionary, a dictionary for many languages

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Wiktionary

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Because of its breadth of coverage, Wiktionary is a great place to start. But because it rarely ever cites its sources for pronunciation data, it’s hard to figure out how verified the information is or what the intent of the volunteer editors/writers is. Having said that, the quality of data on there is still very high in our experience, so we recommend using it in conjunction with at least one other source.

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This article was first cross-posted to both 88 Bar and the Hanmoji Puzzles newsletter, and was co-written by Jason Li and An Xiao Mina.

", "author": { "name": "Jason Li" }, "tags": [ "review", "research" ], "date_published": "2023-05-05T23:29:00-04:00", "date_modified": "2023-08-17T18:22:06-04:00" }, { "id": "https://blog.byjasonli.com/rip-book-depository-heres-a-cheaper-just-as-good-alternative/", "url": "https://blog.byjasonli.com/rip-book-depository-heres-a-cheaper-just-as-good-alternative/", "title": "RIP Book Depository: Here's a cheaper, just-as-good alternative", "summary": "For those of us who’ve lived in Asia and other places where access to English-language books is limited, Book Depository was a wonderful online resource — we could buy books in English there with free shipping, and all we had to do was wait a little longer for it to…", "content_html": "
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For those of us who’ve lived in Asia and other places where access to English-language books is limited, Book Depository was a wonderful online resource — we could buy books in English there with free shipping, and all we had to do was wait a little longer for it to arrive at our house. Unfortunately, earlier today, the site announced that it was closing up shop at the end of the month, as part of Amazon’s cost-cutting measures this year. Luckily for us though, since Book Depository was founded many moons ago in 2004, other online bookstores have popped up that also offer a similar mix of English-language books and free shipping.

TL;DR: Blackwell’s has a similarly wide selection of books and is actually cheaper than Book Depository for shipping to Asia.

I profiled some of these in a previous article about how I picked which online bookstores to link to on my book website. But today, I wanted to do a deeper dive into looking for the best Book Depository alternative, based on both breadth of selection and price of shipping, and to try to come up with the closest alternative.

In discussing these alternatives, my friend Cheah Ee Von pointed out that some of the sites I had suggested in my previous article did not have one of the books that she was interested in: Aldo & Hannie Van Eyck: Excess of Architecture. So I will be using that as a proxy for breadth of book selection. As for the shipping cost, I will be setting my address to Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore to see how the alternatives fare compared to Book Depository.

Breadth of selection

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I looked for Aldo & Hannie Van Eyck: Excess of Architecture on the online booksellers I previously found (Better World Books, Wordery, Blackwell’s and Book Depository), and from that list only Blackwell’s and Book Depository had the book. Because there was only one viable alternative, I pulled an extra online store from the backlog — Fish Pond — a New Zealand-based online store that sells many things (including books). I didn’t include them previously because I was focusing on more book-specific retailers, but it turns out they do have the book in question in stock. So we have three online stores to compare in terms of pricing: Blackwell’s, Book Depository and Fish Pond.

Cost

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While Book Depository and its ilk have advertised that they have “free shipping,” they actually bundle a very low shipping cost into the price of the book depending on where the website thinks your location is. Blackwell’s help website is actually honest about this, which I commend them on, despite how confusing it sounds.

To buy and ship to Japan, the book costs:

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To do the same to Hong Kong:

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To ship to Singapore:

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As you can see, Blackwell’s the clear favorite here, at least when it comes to shipping to Asia.

Our pick: Blackwell’s

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As we said up top, Blackwell’s not only has a similarly wide selection as Book Depository, it’s actually cheaper to ship books there too (at least based on our three test cases in Asia). In addition, Blackwell’s is owned by Waterstones, which is a brick-and-mortar chain of bookstores in the UK. So in essence, if you buy from them, you’re also contributing to the physical bookstores ecosystem in a small way — a nice cherry on top as we are forced out of buying books from Amazon-owned properties.

", "author": { "name": "Jason Li" }, "tags": [ "research" ], "date_published": "2023-04-05T00:00:20-04:00", "date_modified": "2023-04-05T00:41:16-04:00" }, { "id": "https://blog.byjasonli.com/alternatives-to-amazon-online-booksellers-that-support-local-andor-offer-free-shipping-worldwide/", "url": "https://blog.byjasonli.com/alternatives-to-amazon-online-booksellers-that-support-local-andor-offer-free-shipping-worldwide/", "title": "Alternatives to Amazon: Online booksellers that support local and/or offer free shipping worldwide", "summary": "I design and maintain the book website for our upcoming book, The Hanmoji Handbook. Part of that task includes adding links to buy our book, and I want to encourage our readers to buy from places other than Amazon. The most straightforward method would usually be to just link to…", "content_html": "
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I design and maintain the book website for our upcoming book, The Hanmoji Handbook. Part of that task includes adding links to buy our book, and I want to encourage our readers to buy from places other than Amazon. The most straightforward method would usually be to just link to our book listing on IndieBound, which directs people to buy from their nearest local, independently-owned bookstore. But for me, linking to IndieBound was not enough for two reasons:

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This isn’t to say we don’t link to the IndieBound (they are our first buy button), but we wanted to offer other options for readers coming from different places, and thus, I went down a rabbithole of researching which online bookselling outlets I should link to. Here is a summary of my research — skip straight to the bottom if you want to just see my final picks for this July August 2022.

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🇨🇦 Bookmanager’s Shop Local

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After the initial version of this article went out, we noticed that IndieBound had very spotty support for bookstores in Canada (where I live). Luckily, we discovered a Canadian equivalent, Shop Local by Bookmanager, which provides a similar service of directing people to buy from their nearest independent bookstore. So we made Shop Local our second buy button, next to IndieBound.

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❌ Bookshop.org

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Bookshop.org was the name that came up again and again during my research. Their offer sounds extremely enticing: an easy-to-use online storefront that supports independent bookstores, and hey, anyone can sign up to be an Amazon Bookshop.org affiliate to earn 10% on any books you list. But the way they support independent bookstores is actually quite convoluted. Bookshop.org distributes and sells books themself, so it cuts your local bookstore out of the process — bookstores basically become high-powered affiliates on Bookshop.org that get a bigger cut (from direct affiliate sales) and a monthly members stipend (siphoned off from non-bookstore affiliates). For a more precise analysis of this murky situation, see this article in the New Statesman.

The other deal breaker for us was that Bookshop.org is only available in the US, UK and Spain, each through a different online storefront. So we decided that if readers want to support independent booksellers, we’d encourage them to go all the way with IndieBound, rather offer readers two options who ostensibly do the same thing.

Note: Hive in the UK offers a similar service as Bookshop.org, except that it offers an even lower cut for its affiliate bookstores.

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✅ Online bookstores with free international shipping: Better World Books, Wordery, Blackwell’s

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There are now multiple online-only bookstores that offer free (or almost free) shipping out of the US and UK to many parts of the world. They will basically ship to wherever their national postal system allows them to.

Of these booksellers, Better World Books (USA) is the current book nerd’s favorite, because they include both new and used books, and proceeds go to both book and monetary donations. Unfortunately, in our case, one-and-a-half months before our launch, our book is not listed on there for pre-orders.

Our second choice is Wordery (UK), which also donates to causes and claims to be committed to a clean supply chain. They don’t seem as charity-focused as Better World Books (and they were acquired by the same group that owns Waterstones and Barnes & Nobles), but they do have our book listed on there for pre-ordering. So we’ve chosen Wordery as the second buy button on our website, for readers who live outside of North America. (Update: Two readers in Western Europe said our book was unavailable for pre-order on Wordery, so we’ve had to move onto our next choice.)

Our third choice is Blackwell’s (UK), a bookstore chain owned by Waterstones with a robust online store. International shipping is not marketed as free, but as “included in the price.” What this means is that there’s a small price bump depending on your shipping destination, but the extra cost is still much lower than traditional shipping fees. Most importantly, our book is listed there for pre-order, so we’ve chosen them as the third buy button on our website, for readers who live outside of North America.

While we are here, I wanted to give a shout out to Book Depository (UK), a long-time champion of free international shipping. They had our book available for pre-order earlier than Wordery (and Better World Books), but were unfortunately acquired by Amazon in 2011. Book Depository is also relevant because, as this Reddit thread highlights, it is a direct competitor to Blackwell’s in terms of selection, price and delivery time, and may fare significantly better for some regions. who are closing shop on April 26, 2023 due to staffing cuts from their parent company Amazon.

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✅ Biggest physical bookstore chains in key markets

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Not everyone has an independent bookstore near them, so I wanted to complement the links to IndieBound/Shop Local with links to the largest physical bookstore chains in the US and Canada: and Barnes & Noble and Indigo.

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❌ Types of booksellers that I didn’t consider

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There are a lot of online-only booksellers in the US/UK that offer free shipping within the US/UK but not anywhere else. I screened those out in favor of booksellers who offer free international shipping. If you only care about the US or UK respectively, I would recommend checking out Thrift Books and World of Books in addition to my picks above.

Because I’m looking for links to our new book that’s coming out next month, I also skipped booksellers that specialize in rare/second-hand books, audiobooks, textbooks and ebooks. Companies that stuck out in these categories in my research include Alibris, libro.fm and Biblio.com — though our picks above, Better World Books, Thrift Books and World of Books all sell second-hand books as well.

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✨ The final list!

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As of April 4, 2023, here are our final choices (aka the buy buttons we put on our website) and why we chose them:

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  1. Indiebound (USA) — support independent bookstores directly!
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  2. Bookmanager Shop Local (Canada) — support independent bookstores directly.
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  3. Blackwell’s (worldwide from the UK) — almost free shipping worldwide!
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  4. Barnes & Nobles (USA) — largest number of stores in the US.
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  5. Indigo (Canada) — largest number of stores in Canada.
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In essence, I ended up with a mix of options to shop ethically and conveniently, with a special focus on the US and Canada, where my co-authors and I are based. As a designer, I know that every buy button I add is going to be more confusing for people, so I’m also trying to limit the total number of choices while offering a breadth of choice to potential readers. You can see the final result on our book website here.

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🧑🏻‍💻 Addendum: What about ebooks?

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Our book involves complicated page designs with full color diagrams and illustrations, so we’re not actively promoting any ebook buying links, but a reader wrote in to ask, so I did some research on the matter.

The frontrunner is ebooks.com, which is an independent seller in the US that supports sales to 100+ countries and territories, and has a prominently-featured DRM-free ebooks category. (DRM stands for digital rights management. Ebooks with DRM can only be viewed inside the store’s app or website, so you can never truly “own” the book.) Independent and chain bookstores also often refer customsers to Kobo, a Japanese conglomerate-owned competitor to the Amazon store that supports DRM-free ebooks. Lastly, select indie publishers directly sell DRM-free ebooks on their own website, so if you’re shopping for/selling a specific book, that would be worthwhile to check out as well.

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Sources consulted for this article include BookBildr, A Little Bit Human, libro.fm, PC Sweeney on Medium, Good Good Good, Ethical Consumer.

", "author": { "name": "Jason Li" }, "tags": [ "research" ], "date_published": "2022-07-18T14:36:04-04:00", "date_modified": "2023-04-04T22:08:43-04:00" }, { "id": "https://blog.byjasonli.com/why-i-still-mint-nfts-even-though-i-think-theyre-dodgy/", "url": "https://blog.byjasonli.com/why-i-still-mint-nfts-even-though-i-think-theyre-dodgy/", "title": "Why I still mint NFTs even though I think they’re dodgy", "summary": "It’s easy to be an NFT naysayer in 2022. The arguments against it are many — its blockchain transactions are killing the planet, you’re only buying a contract not a thing, it’s easy to pirate, the apes are ugly, it’s a bunch of crypto bros… and so on. But yet…", "content_html": "

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It’s easy to be an NFT naysayer in 2022. The arguments against it are many — its blockchain transactions are killing the planet, you’re only buying a contract not a thing, it’s easy to pirate, the apes are ugly, it’s a bunch of crypto bros… and so on. But yet here we are, still entranced by the whole phenomenon, still trying to decide whether or not to participate because there’s a lot of energy and money going into the space right now.

As an artist, I initially approached NFTs gingerly, with a heavy dose of skepticism. But there are several things I subsequently learned that changed my thinking. To begin with, as this Hyperallergic podcast series points out: 1) some of the NFT art buyers were people who had gotten rich from cryptocurrency speculation (and you can’t really hate on wealth transfer from cryptocurrency investors to artists), and 2) NFTs are just the latest method of selling and collecting digital art (there’s still no clear, universally agreed-upon way to collect it). So in the broader context of the art world, NFTs do play a role in luring in new collectors and help digital artists sell their work.

Then, through artists item idem and Christopher Adams, I discovered a non-environmentally destructive NFT platform started in Brazil, hic et nunc, where each transaction “consumes as much energy as sending a Tweet.” This changed my mindset as an artist: I felt freer to play with NFTs and to experiment with them since each of my actions (and transactions) was no longer weighed down by the side effect of severely accelerating climate change. So if the whole NFTs system folds in a few months, I will lose time and money, but I won’t have accidentally harmed the planet needlessly along the way.

As an aside — if there are non-environmentally destructive NFT platforms, why doesn’t everyone use them? I’m not sure. I suspect it’s a mixture of how mature the underlying technology is and how many people are already using it. Whatever the reasons, the snail’s pace of adoption amongst the buyers, sellers, artists and platforms has been sobering to say the least. Most NFT transactions still use Ethereum, a blockchain technology where a single transaction leaves the “equivalent… carbon footprint of 255,323 VISA transactions or 19,200 hours of watching Youtube” (statistic retrieved January 13, 2022).

So I’ve begun my forays into the NFT space, albeit only in the environmentally-friendly or “clean” corners. I’ve only minted/created a handful of works so far, and haven’t made much in sales. But I’ve dipped my toes into that world, and am developing an understanding of its contours. It’ll be like any other part of my art practice — I’ll devote myself to it more if audiences respond, if I enjoy the process, and if it allows me to push the envelope in some way. But for now, I can say that I did the research, found a morally acceptable spot for myself, and am trying it out. If you’re an artist as well, I highly recommend this approach, if only to feel less anxious about missing out and less swayed by both the fanatical cheerleaders and the self-righteous naysayers.

If you’re interested in environmentally-friendly NFTs, either as an artist, collector or casual patron of the arts:

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P.S. I still think the apes are ugly.

Many thanks to the good folks at Cryptoharlem for their cleanNFT tutorials and for fielding my questions.

", "author": { "name": "Jason Li" }, "tags": [ "research" ], "date_published": "2022-01-14T11:09:05-05:00", "date_modified": "2022-01-14T12:40:11-05:00" } ] }