GAY

She/It | 18+

[aurora-rph]

reblog this if you're fine with your mutuals sending you asks unprompted

[maidslime]

Ok like. Imagine life without ads. You wake up, check your messages across a variety of apps, no ads. You get up and put on the tv while you prep your breakfast, no ads. Maybe you drive somewhere and switch on the radio, no ads. Maybe you drive a long distance, yet somehow, not a single billboard on your path. You pick up a newspaper or magazine to pass the time, no advertisements only articles. You turn on your game console, the home screen is just about your games, no ads to buy more. You open a streaming app, you don't pay extra for no ads, there's just no ads ever.

Think about how much of your time is spent looking at ads. "Download ublock" yeah I know, I have. But that doesn't change that the world is covered with endless advertising. Imagine never seeing that again. How much better our lives would be.

[maidslime]

So many people talking about the ads that are the exception to them. We're never escaping capitalism at this rate. Ugh.

[eeeeeeeestronomy]

do pens have uses that arent chewing on? whats the blue stuff that tastes bad?

[sapphicseance]

mom said it's my turn to hand out the ominous and vague warnings

[solarsyrup]

that wasn’t mom

[angel-advise]

can i get an amen break burger

[eggboob]

here you go & have a great burgrer

[angel-advise]

this post is worth more than your entire gimmick blog

[eeeeeeeestronomy]

my favorite trope is when grandmas drop a bunch of oranges on the ground. its like woah grandma moment

[jp-nichts]

THICK THIGHS SAVE LIVES JOIN NOW!

Say what you will about Gquuuux, the Zaku redesign with the dummy thicc thighs is amazing and I'm here to make propaganda for it

[ifitbleedsbiteharder]

transcribing piano music for guitar turns out is a fair bit more annoying than violin so this is all I could manage, ill figure out more of Clair de lune when I grow an extra hand lmao

[gummybearattacktheworldofdespair]

[sapphic-gengar]

BRING HIM BACK

[gummybearattacktheworldofdespair]

[sapphic-gengar]

oh thank goodness

[spaceshipsandpurpledrank]

[spaceshipsandpurpledrank]

@jorality

[briannyssey]

Oh easy mistake. Yearning actually rises from the floor and longing hangs from the ceiling

[briannyssey]

🥺🥺

[prokopetz]

The prokopetz brain worm is reading a source book and thinking "this needs more huge lookup tables"

Most sourcebooks do need more big stupid tables.

(I'll freely grant that my preoccupation is partly an aesthetic thing, but it's not just that. One of my biggest pet peeves with indie tabletop RPGs is how many of them will put the player or GM in a position where they need to Make Something Up in order to render the thing functional, then not provide any worked examples of what that might look like. Like, who exactly is the game designer here, you or me? I strive to always provide at least a dozen worked examples – and more is better – in any situation where one of my games asks the player or GM to Make Something Up, and you know what's an engaging and high-utility way to concisely present a large number of worked examples? A big stupid table.)

[innumerable-voices]

There's also something to be said about the size of a table in relation to its expected frequency of use and how that affects the players perception of of how long a game is meant to last

A table with only six options that's supposed to be consulted once per session caps your games total play time at less than a dozen sessions before things start getting repetitive

[prokopetz]

Quite so. I've touched on this before, but random lookup tables that are far too small for their stated purpose are a frequent vice of indie RPGs. A table of Weird Shit that's ostensibly meant to be rolled on at least once per scene but only has a dozen total entries is just making the hypothetical GM do your work for you in a more roundabout way.

[orteil42]

why do closed captions keep pretending english is the only intelligible language? when a character speaks spanish what exactly is forcing your hand to transcribe it as "[speaks foreign language]" rather than "Si"

[concerningwolves]

This intersection of Anglocentric bias + ableism and audism makes my blood boil.

People commonly defend this practise with "But the audience isn't meant to understand!" or "It's inconsequential!", neither of which actually address a) their assumption that the [ideal Anglo] audience wouldn't understand, or, perhaps most crucially in the context of CCs, b) that this is a failure of accessibility. A hearing person who speaks that "foreign" language will know exactly what's being said. A deaf or HoH person – the people CCs are primarily intended for – who speaks or reads that language should therefore have the exact same opportunity to understand. It very much feels to me like an assumption that we deaf and HoH people couldn't possibly understand any language but English, so there's no point in getting those languages transcribed for us. I hope it goes without saying how profoundly audist that sentiment is.

There is also, I think, a profound misunderstanding or ignorance of Deaf culture at play. Which is to say, CCs in English-language media are written with not only the assumption that the audience will be native English speakers, but that all d/Deaf and HoH people speak English as their first language, so all other languages are as supposedly foreign to them as they are for hearing people. But sign languages are their own distinct language. BSL, ASL, ISL, AusLan, NZSL etc ≠ English (and are indeed different from one another), LIS ≠ Italian, JSL ≠ Japanese, and so on. So, if you follow the captioners' logic to its natural extreme, all non-signed dialogue is "foreign" to many d/Deaf and HoH people and should therefore be labelled [speaks foreign language] / [speaks English] / [speaks own language] / etc. – which is, obviously, a terrible idea that perfectly highlights all the biases implicit in closed captioning.

TL;DR: your accessibility feature fails in its function as soon as you fail to transcribe all spoken languages.

[crystalis]

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.

[teaboot]

I wish I could travel through time and transcend language to hold this woman’s hand and tell her “girl, he ain’t shit”

[cynosurus]

This is great and wonderous, though note that the story of the poems creation and motivations attributed to the poet seems to have transformed through the ages, as chronicled by this article, and the jealousy motivation didn't appear until several hundred years after the poem was written:

From Talented Poet to Jealous Wife: Reimagining Su Hui in Late Tang Literary Culture

Abstract Su Hui was a late fourth century Chinese woman who is famed for her creation of brocade palindromic poems. Due to an account of her

ABSTRACT Su Hui was a late fourth century Chinese woman who is famed for her creation of brocade palindromic poems. Due to an account of her life story, attributed to the female emperor Wu Zetian, that highlighted her jealous disposition, Su Hui is remembered today primarily as a talented but jealous wife, which is in contrast with how she was viewed in the period prior to the Wu version. Tracing the genealogy of Su Hui’s narrative in pre-Tang and Tang literary and visual materials, this article demonstrates that the definitive version of Su Hui’s story is misattributed to Wu Zetian and, more importantly, that the image of this well-known figure of early medieval China underwent a transformation that reflects important aspects of Late Tang literary culture. In ‘boudoir lament’ poetry of the Southern Dynasties period, Su Hui is the stock image of a melancholy wife longing for her absent husband. In ‘frontier’ poetry of the Tang dynasty, she is a worrying wife concerned with her military husband fighting on the borderlands. It is in a Late Tang prose account misattributed to Wu Zetian that we finally see her as a jealous woman competing for her husband’s affections. The transformation of Su Hui’s image across three major literary genres over a period of half a millennium offers readers a window into the literary and cultural changes that took place in medieval China.

[ryoyamadaily]

boryo kissing please <3

Day 353: how it feels when a drawing of mine gets more than 100 reblogs

[odin-arrow]

look upon my work, ye mighty, and this pear 🍐