Hi just because youre a gay man doesnt mean you can say whatever you want about women
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2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
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Love Begins
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Hi just because youre a gay man doesnt mean you can say whatever you want about women
nadinebhabs: Nadine prepares to host the ACTRA Awards in Toronto...
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.
Shows I Watched in 2025: Ranked!
This is soooo late but we ball. Last year, I watched 10 shows in 2025.
The Rules:
Each show is scored out of 5 in three categories: 1) Blorboness (how blorbable the characters are, how much they rotate in my mind), 2) Quality (execution, narrative elements), and 3) Enjoyability (including and especially rewatchability). The three scores are then totaled for a final score out of 15.
1. Heated Rivalry (2025-) - 15 pts
Blorboness: 5
Quality: 5
Enjoyability: 5
Comment: I read the Game Changers series 1-2 weeks before the show was announced way back in June, and so for about two weeks I thought I would never be able to talk to anyone about how insane these books made me. Little did I know 😂
2. One Piece Season 1 (2023-) (rewatch) - 15 pts
Blorboness: 5
Quality: 5
Enjoyability: 5
3. The Heart Killers (2024) - 14 pts
Blorboness: 5
Quality: 4
Enjoyability: 5
4. Medici (2016-2019) (rewatch) - 14 pts
Blorboness: 4
Quality: 5
Enjoyability: 5
Comment: I haven't watched this show since the first time I discovered it in 2020, but it reminded me of why it is one of my top 3 period dramas of all time. This show is quintessential Period Drama™ to me <3
5. Doctor Odyssey (2024-2025) - 12 pts
Blorboness: 5
Quality: 3
Enjoyability: 4
Comment: It would have been soooo good but they absolutely tanked it in the second half by nerfing the polyamory last minute. They did Tristan sooooo dirty in the end >:((( Why did I even watch the show if they were just going to give us another white, monogamous, heterosexual couple? Justice for Philippa Soo 😤
Rest under the cut!
i actually think the reason they didnt have max and silver interact too much is it wouldve broken the ethos of silver's character which is that he can't confront himself. the mask slips too much around her like even before the cliff scene even before it's explicitly said that he's constitutionally incapable of introspection you can See when he's around her his persona looks so stupid and awkward and slips around so much that you can see there's literally nothing underneath it
when he tries to threaten her into joining the resistance and she's just like no i dont want to. silver's whole Thing just does not work on her and he does not get why
RIGHT. like silver technically wins that confrontation bc his guys kill all her guys but there is still the distinct feeling that she had something over him bc he really does look like such a clumsy jackass when he tries to manipulate or threaten her EVEN WHEN he legitimately has the upper hand
GOD! "i don't care" "you will" and he DOES!!!!
I can't remember where I read it last week, but the person discussed how when we think of chattel slavery in the US, we tend to think of massive plantations of cotton or tobacco, with one very rich white master or mistress with lots of land and lots of enslaved people. But we very rarely think of the many families that had just one or two slaves, in smaller homes.
Because it's not like you had to pay them, so once your family owned someone, they owned them and their descendants indefinitely. Could you pay and eventually free em- sure! You could also send them anywhere you want for any labor you want, could have an enslaved woman bred for more children, or maybe save up and buy new slaves and sell the old. Like cattle (thus, chattel slavery).
So it's interesting that many people go "oh well it's not like my family owned slaves!" Because like, one, how do you know that? Have you ever actually asked your grandmas about their grandmas? How many of your family members grew up with mammies? Have you ever asked? I wonder how many people have actually done the digging for the truth (or was it easier to just benefit). Because I've talked to my grandma, who picked cotton in the sea islands. She had to have been doing that for someone in the 1930s and 40s!
And two, it's easy to think that because your family (or someone else's) didn't own sprawling stolen land and generational blood money like a plantation owner, that it wasn't as important. But... It was. That was still someone's entire life. That was a person, whose labor benefitted and saved a family money that could be used in other ventures. How often do we think of them?
The UK version of this is "We didn't own slaves! There were no slaves in Great Britain and anyone setting foot on our sainted shores was immediately freed! We never had a slave society!!!!" BUT they forget that it was ludicrously common for middle class families to own shares in slaves. You'd notionally "own" a couple of slaves (or, you'd own some fraction of a slave) that were working on a plantation somewhere else in the world, and in return for that you'd get a dividend from the company that owned the whole plantation.
It was a normal kind of investment, the same kind of thing as putting your money in the Premium Bonds or in a savings account. But it was harder to "see" so people tend to forget it.
#also in the uk people definitely owned slaves#like literally on english soil#and it wasnt a hush hush under the table thing#there were ads with reward money for escaped slaves in newspapers in the uk#slavery was illegal in the uk the way police brutality is illegal in the us#aka technically but no one enforced those laws <- prev tags (@nerdvanauniverse)
When the UK abolished slavery, they did it by first banning the slave trade but not slavery in 1807. The slave owners were important to the economy, you see.
26 years later, in 1833, they banned slavery by buying and freeing all remaining slaves, because the owners were entitled to compensation, you see.
And they forced the "freed" "former" slaves to pay for part of it by forcing the "freed" "former" slaves to work for their "former" masters for 4 more years, 45 hours a week.
(I haven't read that they were treated more harshly than before at this time, but when you expect to get free labour from someone for several decades, you invest in them keeping the ability to produce labour for you - when there's a deadline, you work them to the bone and who cares if they die. I'm assuming the worst of the worst happened then.)
The rest of the cost was paid for by taxes. Comparing finances and inflation across three centuries is a bit imprecise, but remember that this compensation to slavers was so high, that loan was only finally paid for in 2015.
"UK taxpayer money was funnelled into slavery until 2015" is one way of looking at it. Brits have no right to pretend it didn't happen.
you have to spend a week in the last series you watched how is it going
good
bad
great
awful
dead
results
it's called a throuple, we're in a throuple
now this is so accurate
Heated Rivalry creator Jacob Tierney at The Center in NYC
Photographer Kevin Sawford has recently captured the hilarious reactions of a rabbit after eating a prickly thistle. It looked content at first, but that expression changed to disgust very soon. Take a look.
Winter, spring, summer and fall, four seasons, four loves
(i did this art for the zukka week of a couple of years ago but zukka still real and true 🤟🔥)
the beauty of life
- // @fairycosmos // ? // - // @cassidyshotchocolate // - // - // elsie de wolfe// @podencos // afternoon on a hill, edna st. vincent millay// rien ne va plus, margarita karapanou, tr. by karen emmerich// - // - // @ annalauraart on instagram// culpable, joy sullivan// - // @ jordanklancaster on instagram// @ niall.breen.comics on instagram// agatha christie// @plasticlove1984 //sweeter than fiction, taylor swift// the summer day, mary oliver
HANNAH DODD & MASALI BADUZA Discuss Leading Bridgerton Season 5
— SHADOWHUNTERS (1.12) Malec happy 10 years to the malec first kiss! (FIRST AIRED MARCH 29, 2016)
Love begins again