Jules of Nature
Cosmic Funnies
Sade Olutola
i don't do bad sauce passes
Origami Around
$LAYYYTER
Sweet Seals For You, Always
JBB: An Artblog!
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
noise dept.
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
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YOU ARE THE REASON
AnasAbdin
Peter Solarz
Product Placement
trying on a metaphor
Show & Tell
hello vonnie
★
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@horselessheadperson
Black cats are lucky. (via leahweissmuller)
MAN [IN THICK ACCENT]: Black cat bring good luck. Not bad luck. I have black cat - See, him face - And I am not dead today: Good luck!
“See him face”
I sure fucking do see him face
Him face
Reblog him face for good luck in 2021
Reblog him face for good luck in 2021 (2)
Reblog him face for good luck in 2021 (3)
Reblogging him face again for good luck in 2025.
Reblog him face for good luck in 2026
"i asked chat gpt-" well i asked my rat and she gave me a gentle little kiss
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.
everyone on replies is terrified of this fact but i just think it's so sweet and heartwarming. she's holding our hand and leading us somewhere secret and we're both giggling like kids. i love her
let’s travel through the vast unknown with mama
Space chickens
Posts like this are why I'll never leave Tumblr
.......I fucked up so bad.
I've been teaching Belphie not to jump on Pangur, cause she's old and arthritic and doesn't like it. and as part of my "training", I've been giving him a treat every times he stops his evil actions and trots over to me.
I thought I was training him to come when called. in actuality, I've been training him to bite Pangur. so now he'll jump on her, chew her ear, and then make bird-of-prey eye contact with me from across the room. and the worst thing is I'VE ALSO BEEN GIVING PANGUR A TREAT EACH TIME (so she doesn't feel left out). which means that she'll whimper pathetically from Belphie biting her, and then also make intense eye contact with me, because she's been conditioned to expect treats afterward.
I have accidentally made the most fucked up dynamic possible with both of these cats.
literally trained them both to perform seasons greasons. this is horrible
Oscar yi Hou (Chinese-British, 1998) - Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, aka: Brooklyn Bleeding Hearts Club (2022)
Dr Suess art posting for no reason at all on this very normal day.
you ever dip your entire oreo in milk except for the part where youre holding it and feel like thetis dipping newborn achilles into the river styx leaving him invulnerable everywhere except for his heel
there's this graffiti artist in my area who uses this stencil and i can't get a picture of it but there's someone with a matching "S / F" stencil who goes around making them all say "SNOT FART"
i’ve some how managed to turn an old gay man on pinterest into a jerma stan by complete accident what is happening
update, John if you’re seeing this i love you you’re my favorite mutual
I’m literally a trans guy??? who’s gay??? I’m a man who likes other men??
Edit: that person is a terf, just so you all know John says trans rights🫶
BASED JOHN THE JERMA STAN
my beautiful wife that is scared of a closed window at night
i hate shelleys new terrible game she wants to play for hours called "wet string" where she soaks a hoodie string in her water dish until its soaked and then screams at me to pick it up and wiggle it, even though its cold and sucks. then she hooks a single claw into the string and stares at me until i remove her claw and then she does it all over again
THIS SUCKS
This is the best thing I've seen all week and I had to share. (source) Explanation in the alt text:
Famously, the Egyptian tyrant causes Egypt to be overrun with frogs because he refuses to free the Hebrew people, but there are additional details that make this a fun one to ponder. For one, the Hebrew says "the frog came up" - ONE frog - even though the rest of the time it says "frogs." So there are a few explanations rabbis have come up with to explain this. One is that a single frog multiplied to create swarms. A more creative explanation is that there was a singular giant frog who traveled and brought destruction. Jewish social media was sharing videos of the Portland Frog protester with the caption, "One Big Frog! One Big Frog!" Of course the frog protesters did multiply, and many were seen in crowds all over the world on "No Kings" Day. This calligraphic work takes the verses addressing the frog plague and combines them to form a simple rendering of the Portland Frog protester. The frog figure itself is made up of the English translations of the Hebrew around it. At the bottom left my signature is in the shape of a lily pad.
overheard in the coffee shop from a middle aged gay man to his (female) friend: “are you embarrassed? about being foolish? please manage yourself better in this situation. this man is not behaving as if he is interested in you.”
“he’s evil. like jeff bezos. Do you understand.” and she’s just nodding with eyes downcast in shame
meanwhile some influencer is filming a mukbang three feet away. he’s wearing a domo hat exactly like this one but it’s neon blue and he’s slurping loudly over the idiot sandwich lecture happening nearby
i forgot to add this until now but after the gay guy was done scolding his friend and they left, their table was taken up by an aging european twink telling a wealthy-looking bubbe with increasing distress about how much cold cut meat he’d eaten the night before and the funnier she found it the more distraught he got about his nighttime deli frenzy
he was like [completely unidentifiable european accent] after you went to bed. i ate ze ham. and ze mortadella also… and. also the prosciutto. no stop giggling at me zis is not funny it was 500 grams each. i ate 500 grams of ze ham and 500 grams of ze mortadella and 500 grams of ze prosciutto and that is ONE POINT FIVE KILOGRAMS OF MEAT !! I ate so many meats!!! Stop giggling at me i am going to be fat!!!! I even ate ze cheeses!!!
i am massively overdue for a very very good week where not a single bad thing happens and everything is easy
reblog to give prev a very good week where not a single bad thing happens and everything is easy
James Rhodes - Is that not worth exploring?
This made me cry a little. The number of people who tell me they used to play the flute but that they weren’t ‘talented’ enough or they gave it up to, you know, do life… This is just so beautiful.
back in college i apprenticed for a dulcimer maker and did a lot of the menial cleaning tasks in his shop in exchange for banjo lessons as well. his shop was in his basement and we'd usually stay up all night working and listening to a radio show where people called in with conspiracy theories and alien abduction stories etc. which was a vibe. anyway he loved my dog and always called her his girlfriend. also if we worked too loud it would wake up his wife and daughter which ofc we wanted to avoid. so sometimes if they were out of town he'd send a text like "[wife] and [daughter] gone this weekend. come over and we can go all night. bring my girlfriend." and the wording was genuinely unintentional but i was like bobby you can't say it like that.
