YOU ARE THE REASON

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@couchycosmos
post this catgirl with considerable delay
a comic about coming out that i’ll probably never finish
it has always bothered me that i left this comic unfinished so here is the rest of it now. after 3 years
the last image of the post above originally had some personal commentary which i have edited out for the sake of formatting. but for context (and for the curious) i’ve included the text of it under the cut (albeit with some slight changes)
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.
girls is melting
Aborted neighbour: I would have loved to do construction at 3am
aborted sentence: i would have loved t-
applying papier mache to the homie who fell asleep on the floor during the party and then using it as a mold to make a 1-to-1 perfect silicone sculpture of him which we place on the floor and gently interlace with him so it looks like he is sleeping restfully with the yin yang of his own somnolent form lol
Into my office. Now.
kinda crazy that your entire school life sets up an expecation of summer vacations and winter holidays and spring breaks and then you graduate and most workplaces are like "you get 2 weeks of PTO AT MOST and if you even think about using any of those days off on a major holiday there is a 50/50 chance your manager will kill someone and frame you for it"
lap seeking behavior
I'm suffering but I have to admit it's fascinating how the Chilean presidential election is between 1- Communist party candidate and 2- Far right candidate whose father was a nazi soldier. It's like the perfect encapsulation of political divide in Chile but also politics in South America in general.
The fact that Chilean mainstream media never mentions that Kast's dad was member of the nazi party and his son has always defended him, while they constantly scrutinize Jara for being a communist -to the point she had to give up her membership to the communist party and run as an independent- is also an encapsulation of worldwide politics in general tbh.
Kast for years tried to hide the fact that his dad was a nazi and insisted that the rumors of him being a nazi were evil leftist libel. When investigations revealed he was indeed a nazi it went completely under-reported in Chilean mainstream media. I've met multiple people who were not even aware his dad was a nazi until I mentioned it because it's not something Chilean media ever mentions, despite him being a fucking presidential candidate. It's not weird considering that Chilean news companies are owned by rich people.
Kast spent years saying he was really proud of his dad and when it was revealed he was a nazi no journalist asked him to condemn him. Meanwhile the media constantly demands Jara to condemn Cuba and Venezuela just because she's a communist. Get serioussss aaaaaaaaagggh.
Posting all of the pills that make you green comics here now, enjoy? I guess?
regret rates
proof
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you problem
owned
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unethical experiments
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side effects
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making sense
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Next
the wrong type of support
[ID: two-panel comic of a conversation between two green stick figures on a white background.
Stick 1 says, "hey I agree with you that infighting is bad."
Stick 2 replies, "cool so you'll hear people out in good faith when they bring up how they're marginalised?"
Stick 1 says, "no I just think they should shut up about it."
Next panel is a close up of Stick 2's face as they say, "never fucking pretend to agree with me ever again I do not want your support."
End ID]
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monday affirmations
- i am not tired
- eight hours is not that long
- i slept well the night before
- the only reward for hard work is more work
- i feel well rested
- the 40 hours workweek will collapse in my lifetime
- i definitely got enough sleep