Consider the following @massivelymysticalarcade - Tumblr Blog

OP: How to create floating Chinese shufa/calligraphy (cr夏末）

Hey so as the economy continues to get worse in the next few years, gambling companies are going to go extra hardcore predatory as people become more desperate. Yes, even more than they already are. You have to promise me right now you're not going to fall for it. No gambling, okay?

This is going to be especially bad with prediction markets and sports gambling, and it's already really fucking bad. But it also goes for loot boxes, blind box collectables, trading card games, and ESPECIALLY gacha games.

alittlebitnerdy

We are seeing this right now with Kalshi's sudden push towards people watching reality dating shows like love island, as they are starting to tap out on their first big market block - young straight men into sports/politics. They are moving on towards young straight women now with the dating shows thing but they will start diversifying into other niches soon!

Do not start gambling. A friend of mine used to work for a bank's anti-money-laundering dept and they'd review flagged accounts for suspicious withdrawals, frequent charges, etc, and sometimes it was fraud but other times it was just severe gambling addicts absolutely hemorrhaging money. It is not worth it!!!

hometoursandotherstuff

hms-no-fun

so i feel the urge to add a bit of context here because i find the vague on-screen text deeply underwhelming.

this is not just "a picture", it's Pale Blue Dot, one of the most famous works of astrophotography ever made public. and it was not just "a dying spacecraft", it was Voyager 1, a probe launched in 1977 to study the atmosphere and moons of Jupiter and Saturn, among other things. both Voyager probes carried on them a golden record meant as an introduction to humanity for any alien species that might discover them (if you saw Kane Parsons' Backrooms, you've heard the contents of that record coming out of a cardboard caveman standee). they did this because NASA planned to sundown these probes by letting them drift out of the solar system to parts unknown. Voyager 1 is currently 16 billion miles away, the farthest any manmade object has ever traveled from earth.

AND it's not even dead! despite supposedly being a "dying spacecraft" all the way back in 1990, Voyager 1 is not expected to be fully out of commission until 2036. to keep the probe alive they've switched off unneeded tools, adjusted its trajectory, even essentially updated the firmware, and through all that time it's basically never stopped sending back priceless data for scientists to analyze.

this is the original Pale Blue Dot, by the way:

it's relevant because "a single point of light smaller than one pixel" makes a lot more sense in the context of the original than it does in the heavily corrected version up top, where our pale blue dot looks more like a vibrant dwarf star. the difficulty of spotting earth in these waving curtains of space IS the entire impact of the picture! the blue dot is "pale" because it's hard to see! by making earth stand out so brilliantly, Terribly Interesting have inadvertently created the impression that earth is this vibrant glowing pearl, bright for all to see for billions of miles around. and it just isn't! the point is not that we can see earth from far away, but that we almost can't, because we aren't the center of the universe! when science educators past have used this image they often referred to one where the earth is circled in bright red, which only further emphasizes how small and fragile our home really is.

but hey, if you DO want an improved version of Pale Blue Dot you don't even need photoshop:

this is Pale Blue Dot Revisited, released by NASA in 2020. this is a reinterpretation of the original data using modern image processing techniques to create a more realistic or at least more high-definition rendering of the scene. it's important to understand that this is not the original image dropped into photoshop and airbrushed. strictly speaking, there isn't an "original" Pale Blue Dot the way there are negatives of traditional photography. astrophotography is almost always the product of raw data being deliberately interpreted by scientists, so the same data can produce many different images (ie if they want to emphasize the infrared spectrum vs visible light). similar work was done by Don P. Mitchell in ~2005 to enhance images taken by Soviet Venera probes of the surface of Venus to be less noisy.

here's an original:

and here's Mitchell's version:

i'm not here to argue which is "better" (and i highly recommend you read the source for this one because it's quite fascinating), just to give another example of the process in action and hopefully clarify how it's distinct from editing a jpeg in photoshop. also i just think it's neat!

which is the real reason i went to the trouble of making this post. Terribly Interesting may indeed find all of this to be terribly interesting, but it appears to be interest for the sake of a vague transient feeling of having been interested and little else. it doesn't name the probe, the photo in question, nor does it give historical context for the mission it was part of. the only substantial thing it says about the probe, that Voyager 1 is a "dying spacecraft", is so frustratingly oversimplified it may as well just be a lie.

so what's actually learned here, if you're someone who knows none of this history? that one time there was a thing and it did a thing? earth tiny from far away?? obviously it's just one image macro but i see this kind of thing making the rounds SO often, a screenshot with like two sentences on it explaining the image with as little descriptive text as possible. it's like there's a space-themed inspiration-posting rulebook that says you can't imply the existence of information not contained within the image. mention NASA? mention Voyager 1? mention Pale Blue Dot? nope! "a dying spacecraft" took "one last photograph", and here's a photoshopped version to make earth more visible.

and it might not even get to me nearly as much if this was any other space photo. i could accept that space stuff is complicated and this kind of fast-food image can only say so much if we were talking about Cassini or JWST's role in helping us find exoplanets. but this is Pale Blue Dot, the brainchild of arguably THE science communicator Carl Sagan! he wrote a book about Pale Blue Dot, he was on TV to announce the image personally! it's arguable that no astrophotograph exists whose context has been more digestibly packaged for laymen than Pale Blue Dot, which just makes it that much more egregious when someone doesn't go to the trouble.

so much of what i love about astronomy and studying the past & future of space travel is that everything you can learn is a doorway to learning more. you can't earnestly read about Voyager or Cassini or Venera or any other mission without finding some odd searchable detail and going "wait, what is that" and immediately falling down an hourslong rabbit hole to find an answer. and you'll never reach the bottom! i love reading articles about cutting edge astrophysics written for people in, like, early grad school, because i fully comprehend maybe 10% of it, vaguely understand 20% (on a good day), can kind of wrap my head around 30%, and find the rest totally inscrutable... but that's still a solid 60% scrutability rating even at the lowest-quality end of the spectrum! i'm no expert and i never will be, but in scouring the written expertise of others i almost always find one or two ideas that end up sticking with me forever. and it starts, every time, from questions about a photograph.

the sin of the above image is that it's solipsistic. it doesn't give you anywhere to put your curiosity or interest, doesn't invite you to leave their website and learn more than they have space to share, it doesn't even tell you anything useful about its subject! it reduces the entire history of Pale Blue Dot down to a vague and nondescript wonder that's just a pale imitation of the highly specific and ideologically driven wonder that Carl Sagan wanted us to feel.

here, feel it for yourself:

----

[P.S.: before you lament that this is an "AI" problem, while yes "AI" has radically increased the volume of low-value (often negative-value) inspiration bait like this, know that this has been a problem in online science education for a LOT longer than chatgpt's been around. this example isn't extraordinary, just close to my heart. nothing new under the sun and all that]

hms-no-fun

lmao someone else got their knocks in on this post before i could finish writing mine. clearly we are hand in hand re: Talk About How Cool Voyager 1 Is You Fucks

💬 0 🔁 109 ❤️ 245 · Okay, I need to add some clarification and correction to this. This photo is known as The Pale Blue Dot. It was take

#info #nasa #space

qin-shi-huang-di

dear Heaven, i don’t care weather or not i prosper, only that my enemies fail.

thesweetscentofbooks

Might this humble subject point out your mistake bixia? Whether, not weather

qin-shi-huang-di

🐎 🐎 🐎 🐎 🐎 🧍‍♂️ ⬆️ ⤵️↙️↖️↗️

qin-shi-huang-di

hi peon, thanks for reaching out!

the official name is “torn apart by chariots” 车裂。 though it is colloquially known as “torn apart by five horses” 五马分尸🐴

im always happy to educate my subjects on legal matters, hope that helps!

#funny

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.

#info

outaspaceman

I’ve invented ‘The Knife-Wielding Tentacle'👍

#video #funny

disabilityreminders

There is a kind of grief that comes with constantly having to decide whether something is worth the energy it will cost you.

I think a lot of disabled people carry that grief quietly.

egberts

How do you three?

top down

bottom up

some other shit

both

Remaining time: 3 days 23 hours

moghedien

thestuffedalligator

I’m going to level with you. I have listened to The Devil Went Down to Georgia for most of my life. We were a country music household, this was a staple of my childhood along with Johnny Cash, Garth Brooks, and that one Chipmunks country album.

I have no idea what “Fire on the mountain run boys run/The Devil's in the house of the rising sun/Chicken in the bread pan picking out dough/Granny does your dog bite no child no” means and at this point I’m too scared to ask.

dementian

For once I can be of assistance.

Each of the lyrics comes from an old-time hickory song for fiddles, and is a lyric from that corresponding song.

"Fire on the Mountain" --> "Fire on the Mountain, run boys run"

Fire On The Mountain - Fiddle Player POV

"The House of the Rising Sun" --> "The Devil's in the house of the rising sun"

House of the Rising Sun

"Ida Red" --> "Chicken in the bread pan peckin' out dough"

Ida Red - Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys

"Granny Will Your Dog Bite" --> "Granny does your dog bite? 'No child, no'."

FTC #149 Granny Will Your Dog Bite

And for your furthered education, The Mountain Whipporwill.

Mountain Whippoorwill (aka How Hillbilly Jim Won the Great Fiddler's Prize)

impossiblepackage

this is the key part of the song, that a lot of people miss. people have this misconception that the contest between Johnny and The Devil is about who is the better fiddle player. but it isn't. its about who is the better fiddler.

in a time before things like radios and record players, every time you heard music was because there was somebody in the room with you playing an instrument. and many, many, many social events involved dancing, which requires music. so, if you're planning any kind of gathering in the american south or appalachia, you need to find a fiddler. and the fiddler's job is to play music that everybody knows and likes and can dance to.

the mistake The Devil makes in his bet with Johnny is that he misinterprets the contest as being about technical ability, so he has this big flashy song. he plays fast and impressively with a band of demons playing unfamiliar instruments in unfamiliar rhythms. he's definitely more skilled at playing than Johnny, and thinks he has it in the bag.

but Johnny wins because the contest is about being the best fiddler. the song uses these lines mentioned above as a shorthand for saying that Johnny is playing these songs. Johnny launches into a set of the most popular songs, played well, and that's what gives him his big win. A good fiddler knows all the hits, and can read the room to know what to play next. The Devil loses because he completely fails to read the room, and doesn't know the right songs.

#cool #info #save for later

micahdotgov

slimy to the moon

randomcanfly

LET ME WORM AMONG THE STARS

#cute

thewittyphantom

Gotta love exact words XD

yugioh-heritage-posts

yugioh heritage post

#funny #ygo

lilboreddev-blog

reblog if your name isn't Amanda.

thatblackwatchdouche-blog-blog

2,121,566 people are not Amanda and counting!

We’ll find you Amanda.

world-heritage-posts

world heritage post

wheezecheese

I HAVE to reblog this eleven million note post. That’s the most notes I’ve ever seen on tumblr. Also my name is Jade, not Amanda.

silverselunite

"Baldur's Gate 3 is old news now lol that was three years ago"

Would you believe my favourite game of all time that I still regularly play is from 2009

silverselunite

Seriously though, the way some people treat liking media as if it has an expiration date is so weird to me. And three years is still so recent in the grand scheme of things anyway, actually!

heroineimages

Seriously. I can think of several games that I would still play regularly if they ran on modern computers.

timmyreads

'RGB V. MR. PUZZLES: Copyright Infringement Claim' Information and Research Masterpost

It's been a while since I promised to have this masterpost out, but I think I finally have everything roughly organized together

This is a masterpost compiling most of the information and resources I've collected while researching Modmad's copyright infringement claim and case related to SMG4/Glitch/ZAMination. Some of this information is collected from points I've touched on in previous reblog chains, some are new points I've come across since, and some address arguments/points I've seen brought up by others.

As some of the information or research I've done can apply to a few different points covered within the posts listed below, there may be times where certain pieces of information are repeated.

Just as a note, I've set many of the individual posts in this masterpost as not rebloggable, as I think they'd be missing too much context as stand-alone posts.

I've collected and organized most of the information in this masterpost myself, so I'll apologize ahead of time for any mistakes or weird wording I may have missed while writing out these posts - I'm sure there are bound to be a couple, at least. Hopefully a lot of this though will still remain relatively informative

LINKS TO POSTS/TOPICS COVERED

Legal Information

Difference between 'plagiarism' and 'copyright infringement' [X]

Standards of Copyright Law and copyright infringement [X]

Relevant copyright terms and tests [X]

Berne Convention Overview - regards law on international copyright recognition [X]

Potentially relevant copyright infringement cases [X]

Case Relevant Information

Background and Timeline [X]

Outside perspectives noting similarities between RGB and Mr. Puzzles' designs [X]

Argument against 'Common Source' [X]

Relevant Clothing/Style References and Notes [X]

Breakdown of Cube/FM's statement on the matter [X]

Character Information

RGB and Mr. Puzzles - Brief similarities overview, images [X]

RGB and Mr. Puzzles - Isolated differences/design elements [X]

Compiled list of established TV head characters [155] [X]

Spreadsheet comparing relevant shared similarities across established TV head characters [155] [X]

Design and development breakdowns of 'similar' characters; Tenna and Vox [X]

Modmad

RGB - Specific design elements and reasoning behind them [X]

RGB - Theming [X]

Modmad's re-known and popularity in the online artistic space [X]

Modmad popular fanworks compilation [X]

Claims and arguments against or referring to Modmad [X]

SMG4

SMG4's design culture and general reliance on outside IPs [X]

Mr. Puzzles' reception in SMG4 community [X]

(please note - Modmad, at this point, is working with a professional legal team on this matter, so the sole intention of these posts are to provide information and context about this case to those who may not have it yet)

(I fully encourage others to do their own research if there's additional questions they have that they're curious about that I may not have included, or if they think what I have is either incorrect or lacking - I always think it's good practice to get into the habit of fact checking for oneself and practicing independent research when the opportunity comes up for it!)

modmad

Another huge thank you to Timmy for compiling all of this so that people can understand- many folks have been asking how this situation is going, so I've asked my lawyer and I am allowed to say this: I am continuing to defend my work against infringement, but can't say more now due to pending litigation on the advice of said lawyer.

Thank you all for your support and understanding, and please do keep sharing this information so that people are better informed.