Mike Driver
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styofa doing anything
tumblr dot com
Peter Solarz
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wallacepolsom
izzy's playlists!
Today's Document
Product Placement
Jules of Nature
if i look back, i am lost
AnasAbdin
Keni
@theartofmadeline
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
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Love Begins
Kaledo Art
dirt enthusiast
seen from Malaysia
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@bluestarsredmoons
Looking for art?
Hello traveller,
if you came here to look at my art, first of all thank you and secondly, you might want to check out the #my-art tag or my #favourites.
If you’re looking for art in a specific fandom, under the cut there’s a handy (and ever-growing) list in alphabetical order:
I collected my art tips on hands over the years. It ended up being 54 pages of notes I took and some guides I tried to create for myself. Maybe some of these can be useful to others as well. You can buy the pdf here or join my Patreon to get it for free.
There was this woman poet in 4th century China called Su Hui (蘇蕙), a child genius who had reportedly mastered Chinese characters by age 3.
At 21 years old, heartbroken by her husband who left her for another woman, she decided to encode her feelings in a structure so intricate, so beautiful, so intellectually staggering that it still baffles scholars to this day.
Came to be known as the Xuanji Tu (璇璣圖) - the "Star Gauge" or "Map of the Armillary Sphere" - it's a 29 by 29 grid of 841 characters that can produce over 4,000 different poems.
Read it forward. Read it backward. Read it horizontally, vertically, diagonally. Read it spiraling outward from the center. Read it in circles around the outer edge. Each path through the grid produces a different poem - all of them coherent, all of them beautiful, all of them rhyming, all of them expressing variations on the same themes of longing, betrayal, regret, and undying love.
The outer ring of 112 characters forms a single circular poem - believed to be both the first and longest of its kind ever written. The interior grid produces 2,848 different four-line poems of seven characters each. In addition, there are hundreds of other smaller and longer poems, depending on the reading method.
At the center a single character she left implied but unwritten: 心 (xin) - "heart." Later copyists would add it explicitly, but in Su Hui's original the meaning was even more beautiful: 4,000 poems, all orbiting the space where her heart used to be.
Take for instance the outer red grid of the Star Gauge. Starting from the top right corner and reading down, you get this seven-character quatrain:
仁智懷德聖虞唐，
貞志篤終誓穹蒼，
欽所感想妄淫荒，
心憂增慕懷慘傷。
In pinyin, it is:
Rén zhì huái dé shèng yú táng,
zhēnzhì dǔ zhōng shì qióng cāng,
qīn suǒ gǎnxiǎng wàng yín huāng,
xīn yōu zēng mù huái cǎn shāng.
Notice how it rhymes? táng / cāng / huāng / shāng
The rough translation in English is: "The benevolent and wise cherish virtue, like the sage-kings Yao and Shun, With steadfast will I swear to the heavens above, What I revere and feel - how could it be wanton or dissolute? My heart's sorrow grows, longing brings only grief."
Now read it from the bottom to the top and you get this entirely different seven-character quatrain:
傷慘懷慕增憂心，
荒淫妄想感所欽，
蒼穹誓終篤志貞，
唐虞聖德懷智仁。
The pinyin:
Shāng cǎn huái mù zēng yōu xīn,
huāngyín wàngxiǎng gǎn suǒ qīn,
cāngqióng shì zhōng dǔzhì zhēn,
táng yúshèngdé huái zhì rén.
It rhymes too: xīn and qīn, zhēn and rén
And the meaning is just as beautiful and coherent: "Grief and sorrow, longing fills my worried heart, Wanton and dissolute fantasies - is that what you revere? I swear to the heavens my constancy is true, May we embody the sage-kings' virtue, wisdom, and benevolence."
That's just 2 poems out of the over 4,000 you can construct from the Xuanji Tu!
At the very center of the grid, the 8 red characters wrapped around the central heart, she "signed" her poem with a hidden message:
詩圖璇玑，始平蘇氏。 "The poem-picture of the Armillary Sphere, by Su of Shiping."
Or reversed:
蘇氏詩圖，璇玑始平。 "Su's poem-picture - the Armillary Sphere begins in peace."
Many scholars, and even emperors, throughout Chinese history have been completely obsessed by Su Hui's puzzle.
For instance, in the Ming dynasty, a scholar named Kang Wanmin (康萬民) devoted his entire life to the poems (kangshiw.com/contents/461/2…), ending up documenting twelve different reading methods - forward, backward, diagonal, radiating, corner-to-corner, spiraling - and extracting 4,206 poems. His book on the subject ("Reading Methods for the Xuanji Tu Poems", 璇璣圖詩讀法) runs to hundreds of pages.
Empress Wu Zetian herself, the legendary woman emperor of the Tang dynasty, wrote a preface to the Xuanji Tu around 692 CE (baike.baidu.com/item/%E7%BB%87…).
Incredibly, there's even far more complexity to the Xuanji Tu than just the poems:
- The name 璇玑 (Xuanji) - Armillary Sphere - is astronomical in meaning and the way the poems can be read mirrors the way celestial bodies orbit around a fixed center. It's a model of the heavens.
- Her original work, with the characters woven on silk brocade, was in five colors (red, black, blue/green, purple, and yellow) which correspond to the Five Elements (五行) - the foundational Chinese philosophical system that explains how the universe operates. So it's also a model of the entire cosmic order according to ancient Chinese philosophy.
- It's also of course deeply mathematical with this 29 x 29 perfect square grid, with sub-squares, lines and rectangles, and a structure which allows for symmetrical reading patterns in all directions
- Last but not least, the content of the poems themselves contain multiple registers. On top of expressing her personal grief and longing for her husband, it's also filled with accusations against the concubine (Zhao Yangtai) he left her for, reflections on politics (with many references to sage-kings) and philosophical reflections.
So the Star Gauge is simultaneously:
- A love letter (expressing personal longing)
- A legal brief (arguing her case against her rival)
- A cosmological model (structured like the heavens)
- A Five Element diagram (encoding the fundamental structure of the world according to ancient Chinese philosophy)
- A mathematical construction with perfect symmetry and precision
And yet, for all this complexity, we should not forget this was all ultimately in service of the simplest human message imaginable: a 21-year-old woman asking the love of her life "come back to me".
Her husband did, eventually. According to what empress Wu Zetian herself wrote in her preface to the Xuanji Tu, when he received Su's brocade he was so "moved by its supreme beauty" that he sent away his concubine and returned to his wife. As the story goes, they lived together until old age.
The heart at the center was filled after all.
I wish I could travel through time and transcend language to hold this woman’s hand and tell her “girl, he ain’t shit”
It's been raining almost everyday in Sweden for a month and I haven't seen the sun this whole time either. I feel like Brush Buddy trapped in the water hat 😭😭😭 The only thing I have to look forward to is the Witch Hat Atelier anime coming out in 2026. The trailer is already so amazing! Who else is a fan of the manga?
The little bringer of smiles.
Rotkehlchen (European robin) auf der Karlshöhe, Stuttgart-Süd.
Just finished watching Naruto - I'm very very late but 🎉
Also first time I'm posting fanart online in years that's scary..
i had a twisted dream this morning when my alarm tried to wake me up where jeff goldblum said 'Actually if you sleep a bit Longer you'll have More time to get ready It's called the Goldblum's Law and it works just go back to sleep' and i believed him and i overslept
hey boss sorry im late. i got Goldblumed
: You guessed it: looks like it's a so-called AI
Mozilla, in its finite wisdom, embedded LLM bots into recent versions of Firefox for the vitally-important purpose of… naming tab groups. Now, some users are noticing CPU and power usage spikes caused by a background process called Inference.
Ugh. Reminder again for Firefox users to visit your about:config page, search for the browser.ml.chat.enabled key, and set that to false:
If yours says true then double-click it until it reads false.
Doing that turns off the AI chatbot features in Firefox, but also the stupid new LLM tab-naming feature that's rolling out.
if you want to turn off as much ai crap in firefox as possible, from this post on mozilla's connect forum, you should also set all these to false using about:config:
browser.ml.enable
extensions.ml.enabled
browser.ml.linkPreview.enabled
browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled
browser.tabs.groups.smart.userEnabled
to get rid of the revamped sidebar, which is also trying to incorporate ai:
sidebar.revamp
unrelated anyone got browser recommendations for when we have to jump ship from firefox
and now keep in mind that all the other browsers are doing this shit, too, but you can't reconfigure them as with Firefox
on A for Effort's last point, is there any browser that offers users even half as much control as Firefox? if so, I'd like to try it as a backup
irritatingly, the list of AI settings in Firefox has grown. to kill them all as of today (Nov 20, 2026), go into about:config and set all of these to false (yes, you'll have to copy and paste them one by one):
browser.ml.enable
browser.ml.chat.enabled
browser.ml.chat.menu
browser.ml.chat.page
browser.ml.chat.page.footerBadge
browser.ml.chat.page.menuBadge
browser.ml.linkPreview.enabled
browser.ml.pageAssist.enabled
browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled
browser.tabs.groups.smart.userEnabled
extensions.ml.enabled
browser.search.visualSearch.featureGate
in addition to nuking AI, it'll also speed up your browsing
so in an attempt to actually use positive thinking, anytime i fuck up and my brain reacts as if ive cause a minor apocalyptic event, i compare my fuck up to the 4 minute fuck up committed by the crew of the uss william d porter.
and only today, as i was having to explain what happened to my mom when i was explaining the whole comparison thing, did i realise that most people dont know about it and ive decided that needs to change because its objectively hilarious.
...which is a weird thing to say about an event that occured on a warship in 1943, specifically november 14th.
see the uss william d porter was a fletcher-class destroyer but you dont need to know what that means, just that she had guns that went bang bang and that she was escorting another ship, the uss iowa, to cairo.
while they were on their way there, they performed some gun trials like testing the anti-aircraft guns or the torpedos. and while they were running a torpedo drill, the crew of the porter managed to fire a live torpedo straight at the iowa which you know, in terms of a list of things to do while escorting a ship, shooting a torpedo at them is not on that list.
especially if the president of the united states is on board.
yeah so fdr was on board and the gun trials were actually his idea, and part of the trials was that they were conducted under radio silence.
and that means the crew of the porter couldnt just call the iowa to be like "move out the way, we accidentally shot a torpedo at you."
but they did have signal lamps and you know, the signalman on board was trained to signal this exact kind of message.
...and uh never mind, the signalman did manage to successfully tell the iowa that a torpedo was coming toward them but wasnt as successful when it came to the direction the torpedo was coming from.
not all hope is lost though because the signalman could still use the signal lamp to correct his previous mistake and-, never mind, he announced that the porter was reversing, which she wasnt.
yeah so at catastrophic mistake number 3, they broke radio silence to warn the iowa and she managed to turn out of the way just in time which meant no one got hurt. and even though the inquiry into the incident led to chief torpedoman (fantastic job title btw) lawton dawson being sentences to hard labour, fdr intervened and waved away his sentence, saying it was all an accident.
but yeah, so thats my new measure for "how much did i really fuck up?" and when i compared accidentally picking up a pencil case without a tag on it in wilko, turns out it was a very minor fuck-up. yes, the cashier had to ask another worker to grab a duplicate so they could scan the barcode, but i didnt nearly kill the president during wartime via accidental friendly fire
@electricpentacle hi how does it feel to be the funniest person on this goddamn site
Okay but if we're talking supreme fuckups in maritime history I gotta butt in because that's my special interest. The Evergiven is a no brainer. Queen of the North was a passenger ship that somehow managed to run into an island because the crew was vibing too hard to the music on the bridge (allegedly).
My favorite is the Pasha Bulker though. Let me explain.
Imagine you're a fhjdnormous coal carrier off the coast of Australia. You wanna go to Newcastle to load coal, as you do. Unfortunately the queuing system at Newcastle is dogshit so boats are just anchoring all over the place. That's not great. But luckily, your crew has The Australian Pilot on board, which gives detailed information about this part of the world and how to navigate it.
A storm is coming in. But fear not! The anchors will hold in the predicted wind speeds. Unrelated, did you know that single gusts can be up to 40% stronger than average wind speed? This is also described in the Australian Pilot. Take a guess if anyone on the Pasha Bulker read this very helpful little book.
(And to be fair, it was a strong storm - there's reports of entire sofas being blown along a street.)
Alright, you're dragging your anchor and the coast authorities asked if the ship needs help. What do you respond?
> Yes, oh God idk what I'm doing here.
> Ugh, no I got this.
If you chose the latter option, you did the same thing as the Pasha Bulker's master (sorta like but not the same as a Captain).
He did this SEVERAL TIMES, while the continent of Australia was coming closer. And closer. And closer. At this point, people were gathering at the shore because they knew the ship was going to run aground and that's not something you see every day.
The master was in denial until the Pasha Bulker ran aground on a reef just in front of the shoreline. I saw the pictures first in high school and thought they were fake, it looks insane. (Ocean-going coal carriers are fuckin HUGE.)
So yeah, you're probably doing fine.
Me: that first picture doesn't look that insane what's with the second wait shit fuck
[ID: tumblr tags: #problematic ships /end ID]
consume | expel
@whiskybravo
i feel so seen!!
(twitter thread)
Examining 'gender detachment' in the asexual community
Saving @derinthescarletpescatarian 's tags because I just like the way they are worded.
now we're imagining someone interviewing a bunch of us agender folks for research and finding out how many of us are ace (instead of being surprised that anyone is agender) but we love to see this
I just like the story behind this. On one hand, one piece of misinformation can easily be accepted as fact if it looks appealing enough. Raccoon skulls look more like what you would expect of an animal skull. Instead of the reality where wolf skulls are actually kind of ugly from the front. But this design is made unintentionally far greater because of this. These tattoos were all found under the #wolfskulltattoo tag on instagram
This whole fucking post is a rollercoaster
You know how it is with Skyrim
Skyrim is an adhd wonderland.
Youtube is full of ads, spotify is full of ads, tumblr is full of ads, pinterest is full of ads. Everything uses ai. Every new update makes the website/app worse. Youtube auto translates almost every video I want to watch. Sometimes pinterest only loads ads for me. Check out this new ai feature. Here's a new update that breaks ur laptop. Here's a new update that breaks ur phone. Why are u complaining about ur phone, just get the newest iphone lol. Join my patreon. Join my membership. Pay a monthly membership to get all features. Upgrade your membership to get even more features. Subscribe to netflix. Subscribe to disney. Subscribe to amazon. Subscribe to hulu. This content isn't available in ur country. This content was removed. This website was removed. This feature only exists for apple. U need to a WiFi connection to play this game. This app only exists for apple. U need an account. We need your email to finish creating this account. We need your number to finish creating your account. We need your id to finish creating your account. In order to delete your account please write an email. In order to delete your account you need a laptop. Oops our database was hacked and ur information was stolen. Ur data was sold from this random website u used once 10 years ago. Spam call. Spam call. Spam call.
yknow how the greener parts of apple skin are tan lines from where leaves and branches obscure the sun? I’m surprised I’ve never seen anyone utilize that for printmaking
finally got an apple that shows this effect well
OH THIS IS EXCELLENT THANK YOU
