mintie

24-he/they-just here

[feluka]

cats being capable of understanding accidents and even giving you a little head bonk to let you know you're still cool makes it infinitely funnier that they don't understand when you're trying to help them

cats when you step on their tail: i'll admit that was rather ouchie, but given the lifetime of goodwill and trust between us, one must conclude this booboo is but a fluke.

cats when you try to get their claws unstuck from the couch covering: this nefarious bitch has never had a single honorable intention in their dishonest and shameful life, this must be one of their sinister plots or perhaps even an attempt on my life,

[freshminttea]

"my friend who I love so dear, who with me went through every danger, my friend Enkidu, whom I love so dear, who with me went through every danger:

"the doom of mortals overtook him. Six days I wept for him and seven nights. I did not surrender his body for burial, until a maggot dropped from his nostril."

-Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablet X

[renewedmotionforjudgment]

So not watching eps in order, but this scene 😭😭😭

A very, very specific cdrama thing that I adore is when writers play with names. The fact that all of these women literally were never referred to by their actual names in the palace and Ruyi remembers.

(But also, Ruyi’s admission that she won’t miss Qianlong as a husband. Because her downfall had always been that she couldn’t see him as her sovereign, instead as her husband. I get the criticism of Ruyi’s love brain, but my counter argument is that it was precisely the point.)

[tiredbtw]

*spends all of my time alone* perfect! but why am i crazy

[aletheyass]

this wound needs more salt

[freshminttea]

Started reading “The Disabled Tyrant’s Beloved Pet Fish” and I can’t stop laughing. I’m already on Chapter 27 and Li Yue is just to funny.

[freshminttea]

Finally started reading Volume II and Prince Jing is simping so hard over fish Li Yue. He’s out here begging him to “suck his essence away” all while Li Yue thinks he’s being slick and getting away with hiding his identity

[astronicht]

I pulled up the sketchy online Old English version of Beowulf and yeah it has 3,182 lines. If you took 5 seconds per line you’d need four and a half hours to recite it (or specifically to recite the one version that got both written down and preserved for a thousand years) (only a little charred). But I mean 5 seconds per line is for chumps who don’t want to unlock the Beowulf speedrun.

Also ok for SCIENCE I timed myself and quickly reciting the first 5 lines took 16 seconds, let’s call that fifteen because I mispronounced meodosetla. At that pace (if you could keep it up consistently and I mean never cough never take a drink) you’d be looking at 2.65 hours, or 2 hours and 39 minutes (or 159 minutes). This is actually 20 minutes shorter than the theatrical run-time of Peter Jackson’s Two Towers (179 minutes).

Now, the original post was about reciting Beowulf in an hour, so 2 hours and 39 minutes is not gonna cut it, and is so far over time that even doubling your pace can’t save you. You’re gonna lose this speedrun and Æthelflæd’s new scop poet is going to laugh at you. However, there’s a cheat to exploit here. In the period when Old English (language of Beowulf) was spoken, people often just said there were 12 hours in a day and 12 hours in a night, no longer how long or short daylight actually was. This made the concept of a daylight hour stretch in summer, when daylight lasts way longer than 12 hours. There’s a good article on this I’ll find it if anyone wants it. I don’t actually expect anyone to have read this far.

ANYWAY, the longest day in Jarrow (furthest north Old English speaking town I could think of) in 2024 (sorry this data is not calibrated for the 10th century) was of course midsummer: June 20th, at 17 modern hours 22 modern minutes and 1 modern second. This means each early medieval hour that day actually lasted 1 hour and 26 minutes. Still not nearly enough lads, but this is when it becomes a skill game. Because I wasn’t going ALL that fast. We need to squeeze 159 minutes of Beowulf (aka basically Two Towers) into 86 minutes. If you could half my pace-per-five-lines from 15 seconds to 7.5 seconds, you’d be able to do it, one day of the year, in Jarrow. Iceland is cheating. Good luck.

[romanceyourdemons]

i love how qianlong emperor was like a weeaboo but for his own country, that he’s the emperor of. touristing around jiangnan like can you believe this it’s like i’m living in a scroll painting. “knee how” as you han i mean WE han chinese say

[grand-theft-carbohydrates]

tbh being a weeb with an obsessive and overly-idealised view of chinese culture is THE most chinese thing to do.

also, extracts from my latest wiki exploration

He had an insatiable appetite for collecting, and acquired much of China's "great private collections" by any means necessary.

On several occasions he claimed that a painting could be secure from theft or fire only if it was taken into the Forbidden City.

i'm 100% reading this in a mafia voice "you can either give me [famous painting] willingly, or i will steal it and/or set your house on fire."

The Emperor's massive art collection became an intimate part of his life; he took landscape paintings with him on his travels to compare them with the actual landscapes, or to hang them in special rooms in palaces where he lodged, in order to inscribe them on every visit there.

"i pack only the absolute necessities for my trips. some teeth powder, fruit snacks, change of clothes, several hundred retainers, and the song dynasty silk scroll painting Along the River During the Qingming Festival."

a tweet from Imperial Noble Consort Zhemin in bed with a resigned expression on her face that reads: here's a picture of me, the emperor, and his collection of several thousand jade items, ancient bronzes, bronze mirrors and seals.

[the-sad-oracle]

The Qianlong Emperor also had this sort of approach to basically EVERY culture he ruled because he wanted to show he was the best at the cultures. For example, he was obsessed with Chinese poetry and wrote over 40,000 poems (of varying degrees of quality) but if one of his Manchu bannermen tried to write Chinese style poems to suck up to Qianlong, he would reprimand at the Bannerman for betraying his Manchu heritage. He was super strict on what Manchu bannermen could and couldn't do, and basically said that to be a good Manchu you needed to be good at archery, horse riding, and speaking the Manchu language. And probably most interestingly, he got really nitpicky when he would read Manchu language memorials and spend all his responses correcting them on their grammar over any mistakes, with many of the mistakes just being simple mistakes that even the most prolific speaker would make or any sign of linguistic shift (or the use of loan words), because he needed to show how amazing he was at the Manchu language and keep his Manchu officials on their toes and feeling humble (and also to adhere to his vision of how they should be).

[add1ctedt0you]

@giftober 2024 | Day 15: "references"

Every woman she called sister died more horribly than the last. [...] So she had never called Mingyu 'sister.' [...] It hadn't mattered in the end, it seems. all that I never told you by @tavina-writes

[beloved-icarus]

Mesopotamian girl sending clay tablets to her best friend who lives five city states to the west: what if..... Enkidu begot Gilgamesh with child?🤭

[itscherryterry-again]

This Barbie bites !

[escuerzoresucitado]

[grundoonmgnx]

Elan Harris, The Great Wave of Coffee

[dommingateez]

me when i first started watching cdramas: woah the sets are so beautiful

me watching cdramas now: hey, i know that street. hey, i know that temple. hey, i know that courtyard. hey, i know that gate. hey, i know that tree

[saltyoaktree]

don't want to write I want to think very hard about my fic until it emerges from my head fully formed like athena

[incestling]

“Medieval peasants couldn’t handle my Spotify playlist” but could YOU handle a medieval bard relaying the epic of Beowulf over the course of an hour? Humble yourself.

[esoanem]

(via @sinni-ok-sessi )

[silverthroatednightingale]

Ummmm NOT losing these tags, this is so fucking funny @astronicht

[rikonius]

Apparently, there are still missing portions of the Epic of Gilgamesh.

This is why we still haven't seen the Epic of Gilgatextures, the Epic of Gilgaantialiasing, or the Epic of Gilgaraytracing.

[toyastales]

Gilded Medallion with Dragon and Amethyst Spheres. China, Qing dynasty, 1736-1795 AD