Untitled @sjpg1982 - Tumblr Blog

An ultra extended flowchart for identifying dynasties! Even identifying sub-periods of each dynasty. As always, this is a general guide ther

does the makeup look sad or happy? >>> goth & sad >>> middle tang dynasty [lmao]

marveldaily

Thunderbolts* dir. Jake Schreier | 2025

rylandsgrace

Thunderbolts* (2025) + text posts

dingyuxi

BLOSSOMS OF POWER 百花杀 (2026) — All the princes have their merits and are vying for my hand in marriage. What gives you the advantage, Your Crown Highness?

quasi-normalcy

Mel Brooks on taking studio notes:

qin-shi-huang-di

hiiii bixia wan sui wan wan sui can we get some elaboration on the baby tossing for you see i would like to hate on the pretender liu bang as accurately as possible

haha! I’d love to recount this hilarious story. i heard a rumour that when this COWARD was on the run from xiang yu @conquerer-of-western-chu, he threw his TWO kids out of his chariot MULTIPLE times in order to lighten the load! they would have died had it not been for his driver!

now, as far as hating him goes, this is actually not a big deal at all. we, of the war states period, view women and children as disposable property. liu bang, being the man of the house, is legally entitled to do whatever he wishes with his devil-spawn. we also believe strongly in filial piety and ancestral worship, so this action is also morally justified. children are expected to sacrifice themselves for their father, so if anything, these brats should be grateful they had the chance to help their old man out!

now here’s a grisly story that would have actually turned public opinion against him:

xiang yu also captured liu bang’s FATHER and was threatened to boil him alive if liu bang would not surrender. now, under the codes of filial piety, liu bang would have been obligated to give up his life in exchange for his father’s! but can you guess what this UNFILIAL INGRATE did instead? he LAUGHED in xiang yu’s face and said that since the two of them had been sworn brothers in the past, his father was ALSO xiang yu’s father, and if he killed him, he would be doing the equivalent of killing his own father! xiang yu, being an upright and honourable nobleman, was then obligated to spare the old man. now THIS is a good example of properly hate-able and disgusting behaviour!

emperor-gaozu-of-han

haters gonna hate

guzhuangheaven

This isn’t a revelation or anything, but I think some people watch dramas just for the “shuang” factor and anything that makes them slightly uncomfortable or needs time to marinate and reveal itself is deemed bad. So the complaint I see most often about Zhan Zhao Adventures is that Zhan Zhao always insists on capturing villains alive instead of just offing them on the spot, even when it means they have a chance of escaping and causing more deaths, like with the case of Hua Chong.

(Actually I saw a post of someone complaining the fight scenes are bad because Zhan Zhao kept hitting people with the blunt end of his swords instead of killing them...and I'm like, are we watching the same scenes? That fight scene in the rain of Zhan Zhao taking out 30+ guys using the blunt end of his sword and not even killing them is one of the best fight sequences I've ever seen.)

Anyway, back to the lack of killing of villains who obviously deserve it. I get the frustration, but if you use that reason to dismiss the drama as bad, then you’re also dismissing the actually important central thesis of the drama. Which is, due process and procedural justice are important and worth fighting for.

(I get that it's a "boring" principle but it's actually pretty damn important especially in real life.)

The drama actually spends a lot of time deconstructing this, and making its point on this over and over again. If Zhan Zhao kills the Yicheng magistrate or Jin Zhenping, sure, they’re dead and as the audience we’re satisfied, but the effect is they’ll just be turned into martyrs. A good official or a good healer being randomly killed by a high ranking imperial guard for unknown reasons. At best, Zhan Zhao would be accused of using the emperor's imperial decree to kill for his own gains, at worst, the emperor's integrity is questioned.

And even if no one questions the deaths, killing these guys doesn't actually solve any problem. Killing Hua Chong really only satisfies Bai Yutang’s rage in the moment, but other than that, what good did it do? No one knows who he was, what crimes he had committed, what hurt he had caused and what his death was supposed to atone for. As much as I love that Ding Yuehua got to kill Jing Yiming, his death like that could have also jeopardised the case. Other than satisfaction for the drama’s audience and the person doing the killing, no one else in universe actually gets any satisfaction in killing these villains in this way.

In this case, without Hua Chong and Jing Yiming, they still had the magistrate and Fan Yulian as witnesses in the sex trafficking case, but if they hadn’t taken all that time to gather all the evidence and extra witnesses, and just focused on killing the bad guys to satisfy the audience instead, they wouldn’t have been able to achieve any actual justice for the victims. The trafficked girls would have died in vain, or still be trapped. The sex trafficking ring might not be totally dismantled and could be taken over by someone else, harming even more people. More pointedly, without putting Jin Zhenping on trial, Jin Xuewen will always be falsely accused, and the rotten facade of the whole Jin family still remains and who knows what harm that entire family will continue to do to protect their reputation?

Yes, as a government official, Zhan Zhao can’t kill, but the conflict in the drama has always been about much more than the constraints he has to operate under. Even when he’s clashing with Bai Yutang about ways to get justice, the drama never actually strays from the argument that procedural justice is still what they need to be fighting for. The reveal about Zhan Zhao’s past as Yaksha shows quite painfully how it can get twisted not just by bad faith actors like Zhou Jiliang but also by the people who benefit from vigilante justice. The people of Wanshan practically worship Hu Xiaochen, but the moment it looks like he was killed by Yaksha, they immediately turn on him and there’s no doubt in their minds that he must be evil. In this case, it’s true, but what if it hadn’t been? Zhou Jiliang was totally intending to kill Ming Zhu’er’s parents after all. Without procedural justice, there's the danger of condemning innocent people based on hearsay and prejudice, and even in the cases where you condemn people who have actually done evils, just killing them doesn’t actually bring closure to the victims in any way.

There are two conversations that basically sums up the central debate of this drama.

And the answer to that is that the magistrate is actually wrong, because not seeking public justice is always going to be worse.

polcasan

op, hard agree on the stuff that you mentioned in the post. question: how do you feel about the fact that the final big bad was NOT legally brought to justice?

guzhuangheaven

Ok so I was going to mention the ending in the original post and then basically just forgot.

Along the way, while the drama clearly is trying to argue for procedural justice, it also is quite sympathetic to vigilante justice. I think this is a concession to the wuxia genre which is much more about vigilante justice, so for that reason, the drama doesn’t condemn Bai Yutang or Ding Yuehua too much for killing Hua Chong and Jing Yiming, and the audience also totally understands why these deaths are necessary? to bring about closure for Bai Yutang and Ding Yuehua, even if they don’t do much for the greater good.

The thing about the ending is that it is also a concession to the genre, while trying to save Bai Yutang from his canonical death and tie everything up in a neat bow while keeping the focus on this being Zhan Zhao and co’s story at the same time. The consequence of that, though, is that everything feels quite rushed and the implications don’t get time to play out.

But here’s what we’re working with:

Clearly, Zhan Zhao is not going to kill Xiangyang Wang. He can’t bear the weight of killing the emperor’s uncle without a trial. What he would have done is take Xiangyang Wang in for a trial, where his crimes would be laid out.

The first question of this scenario is, given how drained Zhan Zhao was when he eventually emerged, how exactly would he have taken in Xiangyang Wang at this point? I guess the adrenaline would probably have kept up a bit more for Zhan Zhao to keep him at sword point, until Hui Wang arrived with reinforcements.

And then what? They take him back to the capital. Now we’re questioning whether Xiangyang Wang’s boast is true - would the emperor really kill his uncle?

Well, no, the emperor would definitely not want to bear the legacy of ordering his uncle’s death either. But he does also have a card to play - if he’s willing - to both get rid of Xiangyang Wang and not have to bear the reputation of killing his uncle.

That card is Bao Zheng.

So we’re zooming out into greater Justice Bao lore now. I will say, I have not watched Justice Bao since literally the 90s when I was…less than 10 years old. So memory is a bit fuzzy.

But one of Bao Zheng’s famous cases is one where he executed a princess’ husband against the emperor’s explicit orders. So Bao Zheng basically has zero fucks to give when it comes to saving face for the imperial family at the expense of justice. If Xiangyang Wang is put on trial at Kaifeng Fu, and with the evidence and witnesses that has been gathered, he is found guilty of conspiring with a foreign enemy, Bao Zheng will execute him, regardless of what the emperor says or wants.

So the emperor could conceivably order Bao Zheng to stand down, but deliberately orchestrate the order coming too late, and count on Bao Zheng to do what Bao Zheng does, that is execute first and report later. This way, the emperor isn’t seen as ordering the execution of his uncle, but given the extent of Xiangyang Wang’s crimes, he really can’t be criticised if he doesn’t punish Bao Zheng for acting so quickly either.

Basically, Bao Zheng, with his judiciary power, can bear the weight of killing Xiangyang Wang (with a trial) where Zhan Zhao cannot.

But this isn’t a Bao Zheng story. It’s Zhan Zhao’s story.

So from a storytelling point of view, it’s understandable why the case of Xiangyang Wang had to end where it did. Because the trial of Xiangyang Wang would be another story altogether, and can’t just focus on Zhan Zhao anymore. Even if the ending is admittedly at odds with the message of the rest of the drama.

I guess you could say, Xiangyang Wang is more just a figurehead and all the people actually doing the evil deeds are either dead or taken in for punishment…so it’s…fine?

The end credit scene does sort of try to lay out some consequences for Bai Yutang killing Xiangyang Wang without due process, even though it also does this quite vaguely. In the end credit scene, Zhan Zhao and Bai Yutang discuss a mission they’ve just been given by the emperor in Western Xia. Assuming this is about finding more details about what Xiangyang Wang was intending to do with Western Xia in addition to just giving Song land away. Zhan Zhao says in the end after Bai Yutang has passed out that he didn’t want to take this mission, but he probably did as a way to make up for failing to take Xiangyang Wang in and protect Bai Yutang.

So yeah, the ending is quite contradictory with the rest of the drama, but at this point, it’s restricted by the scope of the drama. That’s how I would explain it anyway.

guzhuangheaven

joy of life: li chengru and princess’s first date

guzhuangheaven

#wan'er asking in seven different ways so you were unchaperoned with your fiancée? are you aware perhaps of the impies??#and he is not aware of them so don’t worry about it @coquelicoq

lol even li chengze is so here for the tea

thecryptkeeper

i know the way people talk about their pets now is probably how we’ve been doing it for all of history. a cat owner in ancient rome saw their cat lounging on the dining pillows and commented “he thinks himself to be the senator claudius 🤣”

library-seraph

The first attested cat in Japan was given to a young 9th century emperor and his diary about it includes such gems as 'I affixed a bow about its neck, but it did not remain for long.", "The color of the fur is peerless. None could find the words to describe it, although one said it was reminiscent of the deepest ink.", "When it lies down, it curls in a circle like a coin. You cannot see its feet. It’s as if it were circular Bi disk." and "I am convinced it is superior to all other cats.” Basically posting about how his void is the best little void and so good at getting really round

skull-bearer

guzhuangheaven

zhan zhao adventures:

Don't act like you're a saint here to lecture me!

winry-lucy-beth

I've recently learned that escaping enshitification is actually really easy. When I was younger I would use FOSS (free and open source software) because I usually couldn't afford anything else. Back then the paid options were usually significantly better than the unpaid options so when I finally got money I started using the paid stuff and completely forgot that Foss existed.

If you don't know why Foss is awesome its not just that its free. Open source software has a huge set of advantages. Most software is proprietary meaning that its code cannot be viewed by other people. Open source softwares code can be viewed by everyone and people can contribute their own code to make it better. Open source is often more secure than proprietary because more people have more eyes on it and more people have contributed to it's security. Its also easy to know how much privacy you have with every software because you can read the code. No more "trust me bro I'm not harvesting and selling your data" you know if they are collecting and selling because the code is publicly available.

In the last two months I have been switching almost completely to Foss. I was worried at first because when I stopped using Foss over 10 years ago the average Foss software was genuinely worse than the paid proprietary alternative. Thankfully things have really come full circle. 90℅ of the software I have tried in the last 2 months works better than the proprietary alternative and is 100℅ less obnoxious.

So here is a list of every Foss software I have tried and recommend. There is way more than this available. This list is just what I have used and like personally. Anyone can feel free to add and we can turn it into a master list. Please just take these as a place to start and do your own research to see if these softwares will work for your use case before you fully ditch your proprietary software.

Operating systems

Graphene os: android alt. Security and privacy focused. The most secure and private smartphone currently available.

Linux mint: easy to use linux, 100℅ better than windows.

Pop!: The Linux distro you should use if you have nividia hardware and want to play games using said hardware. Very intuitive and easy to use.

Kubuntu: Ubuntu Linux with KDE desktop. This is the linux distro one I am currently using and I don't have any plans to jump ship again. Better than windows and better than Mac. The companion app for your phone makes life soooo easy. Its pretty and easy to customize to a ridiculously granular level. No fucking notes.

Kindle jailbreak- ko reader: use jailbreak to free your kindle from the tyranny of the bezos. It will download ko reader which is a Foss OS that has every fucking feature you always wished kindle had and let's you read whatever the fuck you want, and have whatever the screensaver you want (no more ads!). Soooo fuck amazon and use this. I genuinely cannot recommend it enough.

Linux FOSS: (some available on windows and android as well)

Calibre: Foss desktop eBook library. Packed with features. You will want to use this with koreader to make managing your kindle easy.

Manuscript: skrivner alt. Does absolutely everything I need.

Bitwarden: password manager (use a keepass fork if you want self hosted)

Next cloud: private google drive and cloud alternative that you can self host if you want but it's not required. App available

Proton VPN: to the best of my knowledge it is the only Foss no log VPN you can get. You can pay for higher speeds. App available

Quad9dns: free encrypted DNS provider. App available.

News software:

Use any Foss RSS reader and for the love of god stop getting news from social media. Take control of your feed!

Apps (I only know for android)

Fdroid: great app store to find Foss android apps and download them.

Antennapod: you can get all of your podcasts fetched to one feature rich app via RSS feed. No need to rely on spotify or music steaming services.

Openreads: it's good reads but private and 100℅ stored locally. No amazon, no social media aspect, it just tracks your reading, you can import your good reads but if you want to import from storygraph you have to make a good reads burner account, import to good reads, then import to openreads. The menus Navigation on this one is a bit cumbersome but honestly good reads app is worse.

Newpipe: YouTube frontend that let's you have YouTube subscriptions, watch YouTube in the background, and blocks all ads, without logging in to YouTube. You will want to use this one with a VPN set to Canada (or any other country) so YouTube doesn't keep blocking it in order to force you to sign in. But even with that extra step its worth it for the privacy and the lack of ads.

Proton mail: one of 2 more private gmail alts. But you should note that email cannot be 100℅ anonymous or private.

I think that's it. There are still a lot software varieties I am slowly finding.

centrumlumina

LibreOffice is a FOSS Office suite that can handle word docs, spreadsheets, presentations and databases.

prismatic-bell

I know people get mad at the name, and I understand why, but straight-up I've been using GIMP for 15 years and it's a good solid art program made under the GNU program. It's worth a look.

penrosesun

To add:

Blender is an amazing FOSS suite for 3D modeling and animation, as well as digital sculpting and motion tracking. Pros use it. It’s a staple in game development. It’s what the Academy Award winning film “Flow” was made on. It’s not the bland name alternative to an industry standard; it is an industry standard.

Krita is a fantastic FOSS application for digital painting. Everyone I’ve ever talked to who uses it has loved it to death.

OBS is the absolute go-to choice for screen recording and live streaming. You can use it to record your entire desktop or a specific window, capture audio from multiple sources, and even add overlays, webcam feeds, or transitions to your videos.

VLC Media Player is the best media player, hands down. It’s lightweight, it’s reliable, it supports virtually every audio and video format known to man, and it has built in media conversion and even basic editing. I truly can’t imagine why anyone would use a media player that isn’t this one. It’s just the best there is, easily, no contest.

Audacity is a fantastic multi-track audio editor and recorder. It’s free and it’s good, and podcasters love it for a reason.

And believe it or not, Thunderbird is a really good email client now. I’m not even joking. If you used it back in the day and hated it, please give it another chance, because the glow up is unreal.

technologistrevolution

Just tacking on that while FOSS is usually free as in costless the term "free" in open-source spaces typically means "non-proprietary". It isn't a bad idea to look into which of these projects accept donations and to donate if you can. Blender is an amazing program. Genuinely I like it better than Maya or 3DSMax and it is struggling to maintain its project because it has gotten so large in its pursuit of giving artists things that are actually needed but very few of those artists are donating on download.

Other projects (LibreWolf browser comes to mind) reject donations specifically because they don't want to be in Blender's position (often these have an ideological pursuit, like LibreWolf and privacy).

If you see a Donate option when you go to download an open-source project please consider giving them something. Anything you can afford. The non-proprietary (i.e. "free") nature of these projects is so important but I'd hate to see the best of them tank because "free" isn't actually "free".

fake-married-my-dead-fiance

The most difficult thing for a Cdrama male lead to accomlish is having sex with his legally wedded wife

guzhuangheaven

Sometimes the audience goes up in arms and get upset when he does.

sjpg1982

Unless it's nonconsensual sex where one or both have been drugged.

tomorrowsdrama

Sometimes Chinese Netizens are very funny 😂

nexttimeisnotthesame

"We've never had any contact before, why are you helping me?" "The one I want to help is not you. In my childhood, I secretly obtained a journal from Great Ancestor. The Great Ancestor described in the journal was completely different from the one we knew. That little girl named He Simu was proud and spoiled. Her mother said red suited her best. So she made over a dozen red curved-front dresses. Even though she couldn't see the color, she insisted she liked it. The journal was thick, detailing many everyday moments: friends, family, lovers. Until one page read, "Father deceased, (I've) returned to the Spirit World." Then it was blank. I always thought Great Ancestor was strange, but I couldn't quite put my finger on what was odd about her. After reading the journal, I suddenly realized that time had stopped for her. It was frozen three hundred years ago, at the moment her father died. Yet she still wore her favorite clothes, fulfilling the things her parents and elders had taught and hoped she would do. She felt a vague sense of alienation, anger, and helplessness towards this world that was unfolding. Just like that journal with an abrupt end. Once the last two lines were written, she no longer needed to be understood. She only needed to be feared. She left all the people precious to her in the sealed past within that journal."