sheepfilms
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@theartofmadeline
Game Changer & Make Some Noise
roma★
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
Xuebing Du
Monterey Bay Aquarium
tannertan36
Mike Driver
art blog(derogatory)
if i look back, i am lost
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Cosimo Galluzzi
untitled
Sade Olutola
titsay
Jar Jar Binks Fan Club
🩵 avery cochrane 🩵
Game of Thrones Daily
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@matthewthinkington
From ignorance as a requisite condition comes fabrications but before ignorance is despair, distress, pain, lamentation, sorrow, and then death, which you experience when you cling to things that are ephemeral because you reverse the process of karma. Karma is not a law, it literally means action, but in accordance with my understanding it corresponds to a process which is like a wheel.
this period of the simpsons where homer is pretty clueless but still tries hard to be a good father because he does love his kids is my favourite, so many feelings
GROSS SOBBING
Something I really really liked about a few of the Homer/Lisa episodes in the earlier seasons of the show was how it paints a really sweet yet unconventional father/daughter relationship, basically in the way that Homer is a parental force to Lisa, so too is Lisa a parental force to Homer.
It’s really highlighted in one particular scene in the “future” episode “Lisa’s Wedding”, where Homer has a nice conversation with her just before her wedding.
Homer: Little Lisa, Lisa Simpson. You know, I always felt you were the best thing my name ever got attached to. Since the time you learned to pin your own diapers, you've been smarter than me. Lisa: Oh, Dad -- Homer: No, no, let me finish. I just want you to know I've always been proud of you. You're my greatest accomplishment and you did it all yourself. You helped me understand my own wife better and taught me to be a better person, but you're also my daughter, and I don't think anybody could have had a better daughter than you-- Lisa: Dad, you're babbling. Homer: See? You're still helping me.
Stephen Hawking: ‘There are no black holes’
Most physicists foolhardy enough to write a paper claiming that “there are no black holes” — at least not in the sense we usually imagine — would probably be dismissed as cranks. But when the call to redefine these cosmic crunchers comes from Stephen Hawking, it’s worth taking notice. In a paper posted online, the physicist, based at the University of Cambridge, UK, and one of the creators of modern black-hole theory, does away with the notion of an event horizon, the invisible boundary thought to shroud every black hole, beyond which nothing, not even light, can escape.
In its stead, Hawking’s radical proposal is a much more benign “apparent horizon”, which only temporarily holds matter and energy prisoner before eventually releasing them, albeit in a more garbled form.
“There is no escape from a black hole in classical theory,” Hawking told Nature. Quantum theory, however, “enables energy and information to escape from a black hole”. A full explanation of the process, the physicist admits, would require a theory that successfully merges gravity with the other fundamental forces of nature. But that is a goal that has eluded physicists for nearly a century. “The correct treatment,” Hawking says, “remains a mystery.”
Hawking posted his paper on the arXiv preprint server on 22 January. He titled it, whimsically, ‘Information preservation and weather forecasting for black holes’, and it has yet to pass peer review. The paper was based on a talk he gave via Skype at a meeting at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, California, in August 2013 (watch video of the talk).
Read more
Indian Atheism
The argument that I have borrowed from the Wikipedia article, which has several references, about the non-theistic school of thought of Indian Philosophy, Samkhya, refutes God on metaphysical grounds. It states that if God is within the law of karma or that he administers all consequences, including those that we don’t like then karma itself would be the doer of consequences and there would be no need for a God. For example, when you clap your hands the action and direct consequences occur simultaneously, the movement and the sound, and in such an example I find there to be no need for a God. If it is said that God is outside of the law then he could do so without the law itself. This would have one further implication which is that he would have motives. It is often believed that his motives are altruistic, that he is a loving God, but then why is suffering included in his creation? If instead you say that perhaps the motives are egoistic then he would have desire which contradicts his eternal freedom. Furthermore no one can prove that God exists on a basis of simple inference…
I LOVE THIS… This is me
This is art
Twitter: Where faith in humanity goes to die.
Crazy Beliebers React To Justin’s Arrest
Over the weekend the country’s Parliament approved changes to its labor code, including protections against workplace discrimination based on gender or sexual orientation.
Requested by Anonymous.
"All such notions as causation, succession, atoms, primary elements, that make up personality, personal soul, supreme spirit, sovereign god, creator, are all figments of the imagination and manifestations of the mind."
Buddha, the Lankavatara Sutra
THERE IS NO GOD AND I'M ANGRY GRRRR
Watch Bill Gates get his ass handed to him by a Norwegian chess grandmaster. (His name’s Magnus Carlsen, and he’s the current world champion.) Only took nine moves.
Facebook sucks.
LGBTQ* Poets You Should Know:
Highlighting Bisexual Poets
**this post lists poets who have gone on the record about their bisexuality
1. Yona Wallach
2. Lord Byron
3. Paul Goodman
4. June Jordan
5. Diane DiPrima
6. James Kirkup
Circuit Court of Appeals decision on Net Neutrality will have far-reaching consequences
Giuseppe Castiglione
Xiang Fei in European Armour
China, Italy (1760)
National Palace Museum, Taipei
Portrait Week on medievalpoc is drawing to a close, and I wanted to share what is possibly the most fascinating piece of art I have come across during my exhaustive research. The images of this painting are ones I lifted from embedded PDF documents, and only low-quality photos and reproductions exist online. Some version appear to have been somewhat altered, with lightened skin and different angles to the swaggering pose:
This is a portrait of the semi-legendary Fragrant Concubine, (unreciprocated) beloved of the Qianlong Emperor circa 1759, painted by Jesuit Missionary Painter at the Chinese Imperial Court, Giuseppe Castiglione, also called Lang Shining. Although art historians like to claim the origin and authorship of this portrait is “shrouded in mystery”, many sources are discounted because they are not white or Western enough.
The Fragrant Concubine is is a figure who blends history with legend in a way that has yet to be unraveled. She is said to have been an Uighur. The Uighurs are a Muslim Ethnic group concentrated in the Northwestern Chinese Province of Xinjiang (“New Territories”), an area that reaches into Central Asia and that was not incorporated into Qing China until the eighteenth century. According to legend, after the glorious defeat of the Uighurs in Altishahr in 1759, the triumphant Manchu general Zhahui returned to Beijing with war booty, including the remarkable consort […] said to emit a natural fragrance and became known as the Fragrant Concubine.
Although given to the Quinlong Emperor as a concubine, she resisted any intimate contact with him and carried small knives in the sleeves of her clothing in order to revenge the loss of her homeland. But he emperor was so entrances with her that he is said to have built a Muslim mosque and bazaar just beyond the southwest corner of the Beijing Palace…and a tower just inside the walls from which she could supposedly ease her homesickness by watching her fellow Muslims conducting business and going to the mosque.
(Mungello p 68, 69)
Although Mungello casts aspersions on whether or not Fragrant Concubine’s story is verifiable [because legends romanticize her death], he readily admits that records prove a woman named Rong Fei entered the imperial harem in 1760, died a natural death in 1788, and her tomb was found an excavated in 1979. In additional commentary on the painting itself, he asserts
The portrait of the Fragrant Concubine in Western Armor presents a masquerade of a strutting male pose characteristic of numerous portraits of European monarchs. This probably reflects the European origins of the painter. However, why this military pose should be applied to the Fragrant Concubine…is a question that art historians have yet to answer.
Despite Mungello’s assertions that “feminists” made overmuch of Rong Fei’s story, historical documents prove these aspersions to be false; Rong Fei did in fact receive special favors aver other concubines; the Muslim enclave outside the Palace was real.
Mungello’s determination that Xiang Fei’s resistance to the emperor’s sexual advances are fictional due to records of the daughter she bore flied in the face of Uighur sources that demonstrate proscription in their faith of marriage to non-Muslims, and how that played a role in her resistance.
As for this portrait, according to some sources it is Rong Fei who commissioned this portrait (and possibly another), she herself dictating the armor and the military pose. This painting was displayed in a bathhouse among ten legendary beauties painted by Guiseppe Castiglione in 1914, causing a popular sensation.
According to James A. Millward, there is a second portrait painted by Castiglione of Xiang Fei in European armor riding with the Emperor.Through exhaustive research, I was able to find a poor reproduction embedded in a PDF, which I lifted and attempted to restore a bit:
Unfortunately, according to Kwangmin Kim, the only extensive writing on Rong Fei/Xiang Fei and the origin of these portraits remains untranslated into English.
Evidence is suggestive that this was an accustomed mode of dress for Xiang Fei, and allusions to the untranslated documents make it clear that this woman was a focal point and mediator between the Han Chinese and the newly conquered Muslim territories. Her contributions to China and specifically the Uighur are also recounted in Uighur oral traditions as well as historical documents and the untranslated texts by Yu and Dong (1985).
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