Site-wise TL;DR: Tubs with a social mission. Dream pitches you don't expect to belong to this world. Granular details are often omitted to avoid distraction from the floated high-level concepts. Definitely contact for usage, adaptation or collaboration.
Post-wise TL;DR: Opening paragraph of each pitch.
Fully human-conceived.
Fully human-written except for demonstration of AI responses in the post "Greek Lessons" and for the rarely accepted, short linguistic fixes by chatbots. Rarely and short, because probability maxima cannot accurately convey the finicky soapbender's nuances.
Check out alt text, picture corners and captions for provenances of images. Where machine-generated graphics are adopted, a great deal of care has been taken to either (1) keep to styles of non-living artists or ancient art forms or (2) use generators trained on datasets collected with artist consent.
Merch + Platform Bubble: A matchmaking app where users display personal drawings of their own psychological cell villages in lieu of photos, with the adventurous option of entering the drawings into a pool for compatibility voting by the community. For the uninitiated who need confirmation, the cells here refer to anthropomorphized units of mental activity, not the biological cells we know. As far as the vision and fine locomotor style discernible in a drawing are revealing of the romance-seeking artist's actual psyche, sculpting one's insides to land the ideal soulmate is the task ahead.
The ideal scenario is this: The body does not lie as readily as a fresh set of clothes prescribed by dating guides and image coaches. Jittery brushstrokes, smallish drawings cramped into corners, and disorganized layouts, for example, can raise red flags before even the first meeting. Alternatively, perhaps for some similarly insecure or spontaneous, unfussy fellow users, they may give a professionally high-flying romantic candidate an endearing air of relatability. In the meantime, the architecture and role distribution in a cell village are suggestive of its artist's values, beliefs, thinking style and life philosophy. A literal-minded stickler for logical coherence and empirical reality may indignantly draw out an anatomically hyper-accurate diagram of the human brain and grudgingly slap labels of architectural names and vocational titles onto the various regions (e.g. a " fisherman 'cell' " label for the sensory information-fishing amygdala), whereas a champion of emotional truths would wholeheartedly embrace highly flexible, habitat-like models of the mind like those in the TV series Yumi's Cells. But above all, in the eyes of many, cell gendering patterns speak volumes.
That is, until cheaters come into the picture. Vulnerability can be performed. Narrow, artistic confidence can be cultivated through intense practice. Manuals and papers on the House-Tree-Person test become dating guides that dispense interpretation and codes of conduct. Professional artists get bewildered by requests to double as image coaches. At least, all these take effort. And properly internalized feedback accompanied by long durations of the modeling exercises may well lead to true inner changes in a person. It's the self-help idea of faking it till you make it. Some users, however, will skip modeling altogether by outsourcing the drawing work.
To make life more difficult for insincere romantic candidates, cell villages must be crafted using in-app drawing tools. No upload option is available for village panoramas, however grand and Where's Waldo-y. Conveniently, sophisticated yet intuitive tool designs democratize the technological dimension of art-based matchmaking by eliminating the need for and advantages of expensive graphic creation/capture devices. The technology also seizes the opportunity to accommodate severely motor-impaired and blind/low-vision users through speech-steered brush motions and sonic feedback of spatial and color information respectively. For most romantic candidates, art talent and paid training can still make a difference, but there may be room for catch-up through self-study and the 10,000-hour rule. That does, however, leave those with neither money nor time in a fix. And is it possible for users to hand over login credentials to ghost artists? Even the clumsiest sleuth-type cells in Yumi's and her boyfriends' villages have no doubt about that.
So the app needs to erect more hurdles. Each user profile shall feature two tabs: Village Evolutionary History and Mlog (i.e. mind + blog). The history tab contains all previous published iterations of a village, showcasing the user's growth (or regression!) over the months and years. This has the extra benefit of allowing potential matches to take a chance with otherwise seemingly unpromising candidates based on their personality transformation trajectory, so that they avoid the classical problem of missed romantic fates resulting from timing misalignment. The Mlog is where the user shares vivid thoughts about the cell village and its creation process. Although users have the options to delete that history (to erase hurtful content or avoid self-embarrassment, for example) and leave the Mlog blank, keeping the tabs filled and busy helps signal authenticity. This logic is akin to that of colleges relying on optional video self-introductions to gauge whether applicants submitted their own written work or AI-generated admissions essays.
One last authenticity-favoring mechanism is airdropped extracellular gigs. Again, participation is optional but boosts user credibility. These make-believe freelance work missions start at random and last only an hour each. During that limited time window, interested users who are free can submit colored doodles of the cell eligible for that specific gig, making sure to portray it in the thick of action. The literal-minded empiricist is welcome to dispatch organism- or object-shaped thought bubbles instead. The side benefit in this mechanism is a test of thinking skills in response to bizarre scenarios. A sample prompt accompanied by a background image of a roadside stall in the midst of a coral-colored tornado: Mobilizing math cell ghosts, mobilizing math cell ghosts for a bungeoppang (fish-shaped pastry) stall haunted by a lost, lonely ghost starfish alien! At the end of the hour, an automated image analysis and fusion system picks up relevant, non-offensive drawings and integrates them into the background image. Semi-Facebook-style tags enable people to hover over each cell in the updated image and check out the comment and profile of the artist. This new image will become another entry in the history tab and potentially the Mlog tab.
Underhanded tactics and counter-measures are similarly a chess match in community-powered matchmaking. But first, note that users in the submission pool for such matchmaking can actually enable either or both of inter- and intra-village matchmaking. In the case of intra-village matchmaking, the community votes for compatibility of cell pairs within each submitted village, the outcomes of which can affirm the worth of self-love and self-cooperation and fuel reflection on what potentially synergistic components of ourselves we need to tap more into. Votes are kept anonymous for the sake of minimizing peer-pressure influence on outcome acceptance. To dilute self-serving and troll-like voting patterns, the following points are rewarded to sensible voters:
10 points for each matchmade human couple who successfully tie the knot or register a civil partnership
5 more points for each year the above marriage or partnership status stays unchanged
extra bonus of 30 points for the tenth-year anniversary
1 point for each matchmade cell pair whose artist clicks "Like" in response
3 points for each matchmade cell pair whose artist clicks "Love" in response
The more points a user accrues, the higher priority their cell village receives in the swipe carousel and pool display, until money-mad investors and growling bellies in the startup team demand the unjust return of that priority to more loudly seductive cell villages. Lullaby cells will then have their work cut out for them as founders with inner cell villages heavily scarred by conscience wars toss and turn all night.
A little comfort comes in the form of stackable or huggable cell villages. Eyebrows are rising at this point, aren't they? Lucky draws recur throughout the year. Point gains since the last draw also give users higher priority in the upcoming draw, whose winners walk away with Lego or fabric models of their latest villages, depending on their choice. Material options for the fabric choice include good old cozy crochet, warm dense felt and luxurious satin. Cell village cakes are an idea (not that anyone has floated it at the time of writing), but no thanks, the founders are not into self-cannibalism.
Cell models also grace 3D floor-to-ceiling digital billboards which form the wall exteriors of the app company's headquarters. In this case, we are talking about the matchmade users' cells, pictured commingling in their honeymoon destinations. Some people might wonder why the cell villages paired are not additionally shown as a fantastically blended cell village, but we have to remember that individuals in a union remain separate persons at the core of their existence, however much they share their lives and thoughts. It is a rejection of unhealthy, unrealistic and outdated ideals of total boundary erasure in relationships. Ask not where this cuteness-covered office is on the planet, just as you ask not where the app currently is in any app store.
With that, it's a wrap. If you have reached this finish line and are unattached, congratulations — you're the marshmallow test-passing romantic candidate this app filters for at its financial risk. And so you deserve a repeat of the in-app reminder that the incredible interpersonal diversities and inherent complexities and mysteries in our real-world neural and motor cell collections mean the predictive power of any artistic trait is no greater than that of any disease biomarker. For context, know that no biomarker, as useful for risk stratification as it is, can yet deliver a prognosis with 100% accuracy. Skillful drawing interpretation itself is perhaps a difficult art, not a scientific procedure with a concise formula. That fan of smallish corner villages may simply love pure, empty outdoor space and hate compromising themself to suit symbolism theories. What is perfectly certain, meanwhile, is the "feast" for thought Cell Village Matchmaker dishes up as a deeper-than-skin (mate/self-) discovery engine, a reengineering workshop for mixed-feelings Yumi aficionados pondering about the series' mini-world mechanics, and a multiverse generator expanding the multi-season brainwork's worldview. This author's own humongous hunger cell is beaming from ear to ear.
Remake Bubble: What if Prince Charming turns back into a frog once a storybook is closed? The male protagonist poses the tough question this remake exists for, "Can you really build a life together with someone who thrives only in make-believe settings?"
Spurned architect wannabe Hu Xiu is introduced to a live-action role-playing game (LARP/jùběnshā) set in ancient China where she pits wits against and falls in love with a dashing, tall NPC general Qin Xiaoyi. He, on the other hand, rejects her, first to distance himself from obsessive fans, later on in spite of his own growing feelings for this heroine who matches him in intellect and chivalry. Through a series of encounters outside the game, Hu Xiu learns that the general has heavily mottled skin under his makeup that led to relentless childhood ridicule and ostracism. As a result, young Qin Xiaoyi dropped out of school and locked himself in his bedroom all year long, escaping into video games, animation, ancient literary classics and live-action films, all set in imperial China. He became steeped in theatrical literati speech, which took over modern vernacular that triggered traumatic flashbacks of real-life humiliation. That only further alienated the boy from others.
Grown-up Qin Xiaoyi tells Hu Xiu to follow him around as he demonstrates his life sans makeup, away from the glamorous LARP world. His visage breaks her heart: his towering height cut down by his now cowering figure; patches all over his body that make him look like a torn rag doll amateurishly sewn back together; shifting eyes devoid of his commanding character's cool brilliance and confidence; halting words which sound like the general has been wrongly delivered the script of a pigpen-born moron. She breaks down on reaching home. In the end, however, Hu Xiu is adamant that even if real life turns them down, they should live it up in fantasy realm. Moved by her audacity, Qin Xiaoyi suavely throws his cape over a surveillance camera and passionately kisses her on the set, all while the oblivious crowd departs for the night, a scene that almost replicates a classic moment in the original series.
Sadly for them, the LARPing trend dies down in their late 30s, just when no-name actors are deemed too old to break into financially viable tiers of traditional media industries, beneath which increasingly dystopian cost-cutting pressures have intensified the deployment of computer-generated acting talent. Theater work has always been precarious. Things are not much better for voice acting, which is far more readily monopolized by AI. What's more, there's a limit to which he can pass off his archaic speech as flamboyant self-marketing in all the networking and interviewing necessary to clinch jobs. It is time for him to acclimatize to normal life, yet his therapy process is long and nowhere linear. It does not help that he keeps changing therapists, sometimes quitting any form of professional support altogether, out of suspicion that those professionals inwardly see him as a pathetic creature. Money is running low. Meanwhile, Hu Xiu is fending for herself as an overworked architectural assistant. Her mom, ailing from decades of backbreaking labor, frets about the prospect of her daughter repeating their familial history of soft-hearted women slaving over husbands who cannot take care of themselves.
Hu Xiu thinks hard on her rooftop (of course the rooftop). Perhaps her continual presence as her boyfriend's only trusted ally is hindering his independence and resolve to heal. It is time to make room for potential new stories, for him and for her. She tearfully breaks up with Qin Xiaoyi. He, on the other hand, forcibly holds back his tears and admonishes her to erase all their shared memories, focus on her own dreams and never look back. She sobs more at this last speech, which harsh delivery could have readily belied its delicate, graceful layering of storied literary references and refined vocabulary that speak to her dreams and circumstances. He offhandedly included terms and lines from obscure, centuries-old prose on traditional Chinese architecture, accidentally betraying how he has long taken a keen interest in her vocational passion. But it doesn't change their consensus on a breakup.
Qin Xiaoyi doesn't simply drink himself to oblivion and starvation from then onward. He toils as a delivery rider under a cold guise of aphonia. Nevertheless, the persisting, totally unscripted social interactions in everyday language that marks a history of personal trauma for him, as well as people's derision for what they perceive as an effeminate practice of applying makeup for a menial job, take its toll, forcing the man to take long stretches of days off work. Not only that, the discontinuation of mental combat from the LARP and from the cognitive partner he found in Hu Xiu dampens his mood and work morale more and more. Money runs lower than ever.
On her part, Hu Xiu tries to keep tabs on Qin Xiaoyi's well-being, but he moves away, secretly renting a small attic room from a LARP game colleague in a laneway house occupied mostly by older folks, so that she would concentrate on her own life. The years fly by. She rises up the ranks, finally getting recognition as a real architect. All the same, she cannot forget the vulnerable ex she left behind. Guilt slithers inside her. Gleaming commercial and residential complexes with her handiwork sprout up on various parts of the land, but there is none that can harbor an ethereally beautiful general stripped of his insignia.
She stands on a bustling road junction gazing at her monolithic creations. No doubt, buildings do not have the autonomy to open their doors to anyone. Yet they are fully capable of speaking to every passerby. Hu Xiu starts to add architectural details referenced in or referencing period works Qin Xiaoyi ardently loved to new designs in an effort to compose street facades hospitable to a soul belonging to a wrong era. Then she catches herself. With a dimpled smile, she gleefully erases her drafts and arranges the period elements into hidden challenges, which form taunting storylines across the city. People who can identify the cryptic symbolism and messages argue among themselves about the correct interpretation, whereas others brush off their efforts as over-reading.
The finished buildings catch Delivery Rider Qin's eyes in no time. Scoffing and chuckling with nostalgia, Qin Xiaoyi is distracted from his daily stressors as he registers the sights and ponders perfect comebacks from his lowly position. Hu Xiu's boss, however, is not the least bit amused on realizing that the message theorists are onto something. He castigates her for constructing imaginary building extensions for imaginary people enacting imaginary events when time is already in short supply for their many projects for flesh-and-blood people in need of concrete shelter. Hu Xiu thinks forlornly to herself, "But for all we know, there is a very real broken guy — millions more, actually — whose only hope of affording concrete shelter may well lie in imaginary shelters. Neither the mind nor the body can survive without the other."
If nothing else, her own professional development has been made possible by a cunning general from an imaginary story universe who ignited her competitive spirit when she was in her first career slump. At night, a glistening teardrop falls onto her skyscraper model. Hu Xiu hurriedly wipes her cheeks. She will continue her quest, even if she has to set up a brand new architecture firm.
As a frazzled Hu Xiu carts her computer workstations, drafting tools, papers and models into her dusty new office, she receives more pings than ever from the message theorists. Snapshots of mobile golden statues posing before her buildings have been making the rounds on Xiaohongshu (RedNote). She pinches out on the photos. Each statue is dressed in golden garb matching the style of the historical era referenced in her cryptic challenge on the corresponding building, except that alien-like, fine galaxy patterns adorn the textile. A bell-shaped helmet, spear and cape complete the look. A winking, handsome general. On his hands is a placard with a QR code accompanied by a strange script which characters are made up of axle and wheel arrangements, just like each character in the Chinese script can be made up of strokes, radicals and groups of smaller such characters.
The QR code takes her to a website with a map, animations of her buildings — and more of the unreadable script. When at long last theorists on an Internet forum crack the script, the underlying language is revealed to be the Shaanxi province's Guanzhong dialect. Shaanxi? Guanzhong? Hu Xiu, a Shanghai native like a certain him, closes her eyes in thought. It then dawns upon her — Xianyang, a prominent Shaanxi city where the dialect is spoken, was the capital of the first emperor-ruled dynasty of China, Qin.
Statue Qin Xiaoyi stands guard before a building one purple-skied evening, while an excited crowd jostles to take wefies with him as usual. When they finally part at the behest of a fed-up security guard, he sees Hu Xiu smiling smugly at him. His eyes twinkle but he does not move or speak. She simply says, "Game invitation accepted."
They look contentedly into each other's eyes long into the night. The security guard, hoarse from yelling, shakes his head. In the many days that follow, Hu Xiu and Qin Xiaoyi continue to work out and respond to each other's puzzle with yet more expansions of the puzzle-tales across their different realms of life, the peanut gallery of theorists feverishly propping up the digital sides of the projects with donations and working for no pay as commentators for the audience. Hu Xiu's parents express exasperation at Qin Xiaoyi's solution of escaping into another form of fiction. How much older must their daughter get before tying the knot with someone financially stable?
Hu Xiu does not know the answer. But inspired by her designs for someone more comfortable in other eras, books on and primitive models of prosocial architecture have started to populate her office desks. Fiction is a hibernating blueprint for reality. Qin Xiaoyi has never really rejected reality; he only seeks a compassionate, safe, intellectually thriving reality. On the neverending route to funding and constructing that elusive reality, the couple finds temporary spaces for survival in one fictional world after another, at the mercy of evaporating fads and economic headwinds.
Platform Bubble: An aesthetics filter system through which you toggle on (1) a Black Jade filter to render shows in gritty realism on the days you bemoan the deficit of candidness and groundedness in real-life folks and (2) a Snow Jade filter to render shows in unbridled idealism on the days you need an enormous emotional uplift or stylistic indulgence. Naturally, algorithm-based adjustments, based on technology currently on a solid upward trajectory, can be deployed in this near-futuristic scenario to cut down production time and costs. On any given day, one audience has the pretty cake; the other eats an edible cake: tanned, scruffy military poster guy ticking the boxes of reputation minders, pedants and reality checkers; "Liquid-Foundation General" it remains for those of us in the mood for visual utopianism, transcendental visual adventure, or both. Applicable to dramalands and filmlands of all alphabets, the system leverages pesky censorship demands as a springboard for innovation as it splits each production into two worlds that together broaden viewership base. All parties arrive at good places. Or do they?
Black Jade refers to the primary heroine of the ancient novel A Dream Of Red Mansions, Lin Daiyu. It's the literal translation of her given name and a recollection of her moody, unpleasing temperament. Chronically ill and melancholic, Daiyu sees the world in gray and voices her suspicion without prior concern about household politics or saving anyone's face. But at the same time pure, unworldly and talented, she is the rare young person who expresses anxiety about the finances of the illustrious, large yet silently, slowly decaying clan. The hero's doting elders does not consider the girl a bride candidate, despite his deep affection for her, marrying him instead to another cousin — a practical, outwardly all-round sensitive, definitely sanguine girl who sweetly fakes her own preferences and a sighting that throws Daiyu under the bus to suit the occasion.
Snow Jade refers to the primary hero of the modern screen offering that many of us know has riled up the Chinese military, Pursuit Of Jade. The snow jade is not in his name, Xie Zheng, but certainly in his hyper-refined appearance and complex personality. In the novel the drama has been adapted from, Xie Zheng is described as having complexion "much fairer than snow" and a "face resembling cold jade." The military slammed the faithful onscreen reproduction of the look for a deplorable, reality-defying lack of masculine toughness, after which media regulators swiftly proceeded to hold a meeting with streaming platforms and some prominent production firms, in which media industry players are exhorted to uphold state values and promote a "healthy" conception of aesthetics.
Common to both works are massive followings. Now, picture this: what would centuries of literary history be like if readers also had a choice between Black Jade and Snow Jade as metaphorical names for the heroine indifferent to playing the game of warm social diplomacy? Without universal iconography, it might be clumsier to conduct symbolism-laden thematic analysis and hold cultural conversations with broad swathes of fellow fans and scholars. Community building is a huge part of fiction consumption.
Another possible reason why choose-your-own-adventure narratives have yet to gain half as much traction is cognitive and artistic leadership. Consumers can fill in the blanks as they wish, but what persuades them to explore someone else's vision, rather than spend the same time weaving their own stories, in the first place is perhaps a combination of labor conservation and aspiration toward a realm of knowledge reservoirs, intense brainstorming output, elaborate craftsmanship, and ingenious jigsaw assemblages beyond what their busy minds and isolated life experiences can furnish them. To simply bend to their preferences at the slightest opportunity is to break that magic and deny full access to that realm.
Do not forget that consumers care about representation not just as a matter of preferences, but also as matter of what they want others to see. Even if Black Jade and Snow Jade were used to connote the same personality, some modern feminist fans of Daiyu might want the imagery of black jade in association with a young girl, with its streak of defiance, to be a broadly visible statement. The Chinese military, on the other hand, understandably does not want embarrassing memes of a so-called effeminate Chinese general going viral on the global Internet. More broadly speaking, traditionalists would fume at the prospect of what they see as uncanny celebrated aesthetic norms feeding into society's bodily expectations, overriding any default Black Jade setting holding up alternate images. Yet "Snow" Pursuit Of Jade fans, well aware that idol dramas like theirs are not some terrain where you study authentic combat, would prefer unashamed endorsement of dreamy fictional hero Xie Zheng's mesmerizing brand of male beauty, which plays a fascinating duet with his cold-blooded ferociousness, instead of being labeled themselves as naive and shallow female fanatics (as if male fans were entirely absent).
Nevertheless, while the international community has no moral or legal right to dictate Chinese media governance, a case can be made for championing rhetoric competition among diverse screen representations and ideological stances in jurisdictions where we do have a say. That room for exchange of ideas and argumentative persuasion is more constructive than direct shutdown of upsetting modes of creativity whose links to any living figure or demographic group are at best strained associations. Similarly, canon and alternate canon identified with different visual presentations of the same show are fodder for comparative analysis that inspires more discussion and insights into the strengths and weaknesses of each approach in any given context. In short, have viewers and authorities alike participate in civic campaigning for their chosen jade filter for a given show while the other filter lives on.
Make no mistake that the proposed dual filter system should not and cannot give a free pass to all and sundry. There are various categories of objectionable content even the most realist television, web platform or cinema is unable to legally show through the Black Jade filter in most, if not all, countries: child pornography, state secrets, extreme gore (e.g. explicit dismemberment), etc. The Snow Jade filter, on the other hand, has its artistic liberty potentially constrained by the level of suspension of disbelief enough viewers are comfortable with to maximize commercial exploitation. Baseline ethical sensibility should also bar blatant mismatches of visual styles and contexts, so that funeral scenes default to somber cinematography, not Candycore, under the Snow Jade filter. In fact, the need for narrative flexibility within a production may mean that some directors would resent applying the same aesthetic lens across the work or restricting any style to one viewing mode. Filter selection is not wholly definitive of the watching experience and has to be foregone in shows whose uncontroversial intended effects are achievable only through adherence to one strict artistic vision and in shows that set out to be stylistically uncategorizable.
That is our reality: We believe in compromises; we live in compromises. All the more reason for cherishing spaces for unpleasant truths and imaginative possibilities alike.
Design Bubble: A cluster of elite colleges and universities spearheads a global architectural movement in which photorealistic skin textures and tones cover all walls of skyscrapers on campuses and other areas. A wide range of skin types is represented through the different painted monoliths: aged skins, skins of different ethnicities, pathological skin conditions (e.g. vitiligo), calloused skins, veiny feminine skins, etc. Celebrate how great we already look without the fear-compelled, expensive, environmentally wasteful mask of cosmetics. Make our tallest buildings prominent monuments to humanity, not monuments to lifeless glass. That is when height truly achieves elevation.
It's indubitably a tall order, since campuses tend to be vertically challenged. Few educational institutions boast of skyscrapers, fewer still multiple skyscrapers. Nevertheless, future evolution of educational models as well as ongoing search for solutions to student housing shortages may spur the proliferation of high-rise developments that boost chances of drawing such institutions into that aesthetic leadership role.
In the cluster assemblage process, these institutions may question why they are scouted for the role in the first place when they are chiefly intellectual places and the desired message about pride and inclusivity is by no means unique to the higher education sector. Those are valid points. However, compared to the arts sector, which, unfair as it is, make up dispensable, unreal spaces in probably many people's mental landscapes, and government and corporate sectors, which are more (though not alone) invested in the visual currency and language of smooth perfectionism, elite academia is uniquely poised in its simultaneous symbolism of relentless excellence and missions of truth-seeking and norm interrogation. Architecture is more than urban makeup, and dermatology has long been a proper science.
Platform Bubble: In this atmospheric VR game with translucent, misty aesthetics and graded watercolor washes, you're an orphaned tea spirit (with human-like appearance, in flowing hemp robes) who have returned from your ancestral home to your adoptive country of colorful berry spirits only to find it freshly besieged by wine spirit invaders, who have trapped your fellow citizens under frozen massive chunks of wine sculpted by dark magic into beautiful artificial mountains, lakes and other expansive geographical features. To release these berry spirits who have brought you up with so much kindness, you must run through the land and perform both of these:
Fight off wine spirits by executing martial art moves inspired by diverse real martial art forms like swordfighting, jujutsu, taekwondo and tai chi but designed to incorporate berry spirits' bubbliness and nimbleness and swishing tea's movements and poetic connotations. Your moves are rendered as surging streams of tea moving in the air and dissipating as scorching steam once they hit their targets. The wine spirits will naturally execute martial art moves rendered as fiery streams of their own liquid. Keep track of your liquor exposure. Over-intoxication will incapacitate you.
Slice apart mass after mass of frozen wine terrain to release the berry spirits. But since the martial art moves are not powerful enough to accomplish that, you need to tap on a martial art form that can exponentially amplify organic strength — mathematics. When you reach a geographical feature with trapped spirits and the surroundings are clear, call up the associated math problem, which shall thematically match the feature, and fill in the missing terms by wielding an ink brush. Expect matrices for frozen wine taking the shapes of the Australian rock formation Uluru and other polyhedral masses, calculus for undulating mountain ranges, and more. The resulting math notations function as incantations that unleash mystical forces. Look out in particular for the roaring audiovisual effects when frozen wine seas split and melt off to the sides, like the parting of the Red Sea, after you successfully resolve messy complex number expressions into clean real and imaginary components (i.e. a ± bi).
At this point, one might question why the VR game does not mix action and academics more thoroughly for higher sensory satisfaction by designing mechanical puzzles in which players' math input takes the form of Rubik's Cube-like wine block rotation or lever pulling. The answer lies in the need for question banks large enough to minimize the recurrence of identical math challenges across players and game replays. Direct math language input accommodates greater flexibility in problem design, thereby supporting the scaling up of question banks. So your quantitative-reasoning brain cannot just outsource the work to game walkthroughs. Chatbot outsourcing remains highly likely, but mitigated to a degree by the marketing team encouraging fans to post livestream evidence of themselves alternating between dueling and AI-free math problem-solving.
Opponents and math problems increase in difficulty as the game progresses. You have help, however, from some released berry spirits upon their recuperation. The invasion has crushed a proportion of berry spirits, who on release morph into berry juice spirits that develop versatile, wide-reaching attack techniques. Moreover, berry spirits gave you the foundation in mathematics. They refined the bean counting of bean spirits into the more comprehensive, intellectually vibrant discipline of berry counting. So you can tap on sober berry spirits for hints. These hints are limited, though, because the recuperated berry spirits are busy fending off wine spirits and rebuilding the land. Consulting still-drunken berry spirits, on the other hand, will lead to comical responses (e.g. prompts with pi inducing panic about berry jam trapped inside pies).
Physical merchandise is a huge part of Tea Spirit Orphan. On each new play, you select a tea variety (chamomile, jasmine, masala chai, green tea, etc.) which determines the look of your hemp robe and tea streams (as well as martial art style) in the game, and a physical copy of the hemp robe will be shipped to you. Major mid-game milestones earn you a shipment of one package of sachets of the tea. Complete liberation of the land earns you a physical hoodie which front side features your favorite solved math problem and back side features your in-game self enacting your favorite action move. A persistent bug is the impossibility of instantaneous delivery. On the flip side, don't we take things for granted when they are too readily available? Take comfort in how delayed access within reasonable limits heightens mystery and anticipation in the case of non-essentials like such artifacts from a fantasy universe.
Not a muscle or matrix person? Nothing is fixed in stone. In-game tutorials guide you in the basics. Need more help? Head down to your nearest Tea Leaves Pattern Guild to meet alternate fates in other players — the variants of you in parallel universes. Informal player-to-player coaching, under the safety supervision of staff, is free, whereas vetted coaching schemes require a fee. But hey, it's an earning opportunity, since coach positions in the schemes are open for applications from skilled players.
👛-🎨 Hybrid Bubble: George Bernard Shaw's Henry Higgins is not a professor in this television adaptation that takes you on an unanticipated tour of art history (more about the art history part later). But neither is he always quite a ratcatcher, because the number of rats he releases into a particular mansion exceeds the number of rats he nabs there. Every time he is called up by the family to hunt down rats, he slyly releases rat pups at the mansion's periphery, so that the perpetual need to exterminate the migrating growing rats in the mansion will give him more chances to peek at the aristocratic girls practicing ballet in expensive, fairy-like tutus. Yet the more he peeks, the more disgruntled he is with his lot in life: a ramshackle neighborhood whose women are like brutes in comparison, including his family-arranged fiancée Eliza Doolittle. Eliza is a plain-looking young milkwoman, not even a flower girl, who walks in crude, large strides despite her soft-spoken mannerism. Unfair lottery! One day, however, Henry has a new resolve:
"I know. I'm a lowlife. But I sure can elevate my girl."
Henry starts waylaying the industrious Eliza with all sorts of rat trap formations that force her to maneuver her way around them in delicate, rhythmic steps. What an overlooked dance instructor genius your rat-catching husband is, he grins to himself. Eliza's early-morning work schedules also mean that barely anyone shares her pathways, so his godly benevolent lessons can proceed uninterrupted. He just needs to clean up the pathways in time before all the reclusive residents, in this neighborhood spooked by rumors of hauntings, stand on Eliza's side.
It does not take long before Eliza is stuck in paranoia mode, never knowing when another trap will ambush her or what other nefarious scheme Henry has up his sleeves. Yet nobody sees why anyone, least of all her charming and affable husband-to-be so well-liked and relied upon by his rich clients, would go to such lengths to make a sweet, harmless girl's life miserable. Not even her bosom friends listen beyond her third sentence. The odd rat trap people concede she encounters here and there is but a visible wee nuisance she could have avoided with a little more care in popular opinion, far unlike the palpable yet mysterious paranormal force lurking in the shadows of the neighborhood. Accompanying her on her routine for once? Out of question in this seedy place. And on the odd occasion an escort is dragged along, yawning and muttering, Henry swiftly sweeps away the traps before any enters their view. The moment the bored escort curses and departs, the traps come back in full force. So the rat trap dance lessons march on.
In time, Eliza's hate-pregnant, hyper-vigilant glances alarm families she visits at work, while her feet, twisted and injured more and more by the traps, can no longer keep up with her schedule. Her employer wastes no time firing her.
Eliza takes on a job in a beer factory. Henry shakes head at how she would rather quit, he presumes, a decent womanly job than improve herself. He checks out her commutes and replants the traps. Her horror renewed, Eliza quickly switches to longer, roundabout commutes so that she can stick to more widely shared pathways. Irritated, Henry sneaks into the factory and lays out the traps at a small door only she uses at particular times. Her feet become more crooked, swollen and purple. Eliza begs to switch tasks in the merciless factory run like tight clockwork. She insists on carrying out waste through the door only when co-workers, all irritable and wary of facing disciplining, are busy using it too. To confuse matters more, she starts seeing rat traps even where they are absent, killing all credibility of her testimony. The factory shows her The Door.
Eliza takes to mending clothes for an even more modest living at her hovel, where an alcoholic uncle, her sole kin, swears all day round, orders her around like a bloated king, and flatly turns down her umpteenth plea to call off the wedding. Henry waits for days and days for her to get a new job and a new work routine in vain. Rolling his eyes at the stubbornly lumpy cow he has for a prospective wife, he smirks at the hovel's doorsteps. Sure enough, the rat traps start greeting Eliza there whenever she leaves for errands. But this is her turf, so she tries different timings. No problem. With his honeyed tongue, Henry readily re-times his work appointments to adapt to her. Eliza tries slipping out an obscure window. He has it covered from the beginning. But why stop at these measures? He raises the challenge levels of his rat trap dance layouts.
A disheveled Eliza wanders the street aimlessly one night, traumatized as usual at the thought of approaching her doorway. Rabid and rest-deprived, she slumps beside a scavenger's garbage cart, abstractedly nibbling a fly-blown scrap of shapeless apricot. Without any warning from her body, tears flow uncontrollably out of her. Sheets of rain descend, lest we forget this is London. In her misty vision, she spies a rental notice. The next day, Henry is stunned to overhear sightings of her in handcuffs. Next to the notice was a poster seeking witnesses for a cold-blooded murder.
The constables debate her confession. Some doubt the shivering, frail woman who cannot reason straight. Others cannot forget the vengeful, shifting glares of her bloodshot eyes. Their superior demands speeding up work on the case. Meanwhile, Eliza, disoriented in her new surroundings, gets into a brawl with fellow cell occupants. On her escorted journey to a house of detention, she catches sight of a neatly dressed simple milkwoman singing a soft tune while striding confidently to a house, where she lovingly pours out the nourishing creamy beverage. Seeing the old self she terribly misses in the woman, Eliza breaks away from the officers and charges towards her. Even while the officers rein her back and press her down, her arms stretch out for the perplexed woman.
That night, Eliza has a fever. In her delirium, the woods in her old neighborhood glow purple, to no one's notice, and she is mentally transported to the dream of a certain 17th-century Dutch painter. In dream, she gets to be clean and limpid-eyed once more. Mesmerized by his peaceful brushstrokes etching out a placid scene of an ordinary woman at work, she shares her story and pleads with him to let her old self live on his canvas. The dream ends. But the sympathizing painter ropes in a Vermeer housemaid to model her, preserving Eliza's facial features as best as he can.
As the days pass in the present timeline, the now incensed uncle rips into Henry, not because he finally believes Eliza but because he needs somebody to blame for losing his sole source of financial support. This drunkard poses such a menace that Henry eventually flees the neighborhood and any place, including the mansion, he the rat tamer is known to frequent.
Does any of us expect Henry to consider the exile his own doing? He sure does not. Gnashing his teeth after he has to avoid the mansion too, Henry resolves to restore some justice for himself. He sets his eyes on a frail, shy, but at the same time, seductively slender governess in the new town he settles in. She shall be remade into one of those athletic and radiant aristocratic ballerinas under the tutelage of his rat trap mazes. Why, he even makes the mazes more intricate in pattern and unpredictable in timing. What Henry does not notice is an ominous force cloud starting to gather strength in a dumping ground.
The more the sequence of rat trap lessons progresses, the stronger the force grows. The household the governess teaches at also gives her her walking papers. But just when the dumping ground starts to glow purple one evening, the now red-eyed governess marches into Henry's own hovel, a weird homemade trebuchet right at her side, and catapults rat traps she has swept up from his outings. The commotion attracts the attention of neighbors, and news spread throughout the town. Unlike the case of the milkwoman, however, the townsfolk, not having lived under the shadow of the force for much of their lives, share closer relationships with each other and the governess. Although her new mannerisms rattle them and her claims sound no less eccentric and paranoid, they cast suspicion on the newcomer that Henry is, because there must be some reason for the meek girl's radical changes. And thus it's time again for Henry to set up shop elsewhere.
Third location, third rat trap ballet tutee, third mysterious force. Henry is careful to pick an aloof and naive girl this time. She is slower to suspect him, yet arrives at the guess all the same, except that self-doubt stops her from trusting herself. So she never fights back. Instead, she attempts to take her life. As she lies on her death bed, the third force glows bright in purple, propelling her across spacetime into another Dutch painter Cornelis Bisschop's work dream, where sparkles return to her eyes as she whispers her longing to return to the days when she was just a simple girl preoccupied with cooking work that now looks so serene and carefree in comparison. Bisschop on waking up, immortalizes her as the girl whose cheeks are as healthy and rosy as the fruit she peels in his next creation Woman Peeling An Apple. Meanwhile, gossip about this rat-trap-babbling girl reaches the governess. She arrives in town, in time to witness the girl's funeral.
Oblivious, Henry moves on to his fourth tutee, while the governess proceeds with her investigation and retaliation. Over time and more locations and more tutees, she comes to the rescue of some females, slips up on some, ropes some into her revenge team, and no doubt, locks horns with Henry, who in response charms and entices people into joining his side. Team Henry shamelessly propagates a narrative that depicts Team Governess as a delusional cult full of members with personal demons who stray from their proper, domestic spheres. Purple glows fade and shine. Occasional witnesses of the rat trap schemes are intimidated into silence. More succumbing females spirit-travel into the dreams of more painters, turning into more art masterpieces: Vermeer's The Lacemaker, Flemish painter Adam de Coster's A Young Woman Holding A Distaff Before A Lit Candle, French painter Edgar Degas' Woman Ironing, his compatriot Jean-François Millet's Woman Sewing By Lamplight as well as Woman With A Rake, Canadian painter Helen Galloway McNicoll's The Bean Harvest, and American painter Winslow Homer's Girl Shelling Peas. Make no mistake — the accompanying music is not triumphant or festive, but rather at times warming yet bittersweet, at times reminiscent of wispy threads, and at times plainly hymns of unseen nomads in the night seeking the horizon of dawn.
Towards the end of this line of females, we also hear victim monologues. By today's standards and by the standards of victims ahead of their time, even as those artworks overall elevate the visibility and dignity of humble feminine labor, the narrow scope of professions represented reflects historical shackles on female roles and female talent utilization. Neither do the artistic traditions behind the works always accord proper respect to their subjects in general. Milkmaids and maids in the Netherlands of yore, for instance, were often depicted as objects of erotic desire. And then, among maid and non-maid jobs alike, there are the backbreaking work realities, readily brushed off in idyllic strokes. How perverse it is that this little freedom in the unmoored alternate world constituted by the various canvases holds such allure for our tormented females, thanks to rodent inspirations.
A woman hopelessly in love with a dashing chap on Team Henry joins Team Governess as a saboteur. To Team Governess, she proposes giving Team Henry a taste of their own medicine by luring them into rat trap dances. To Team Henry, she encourages mobilizing the police to catch Team Governess red-handed and destroy all credibility of their claims when the women lay the traps. It's a flawless plan. When the police arrive after receiving a tip-off note, though, they see the woman shrieking, hopping and limping among the traps. It turns out that the governess has seen through the woman. Her rat trap dance lesson, brought forward in time to a strategic location near the one in the original plan without alerting the woman, boosts Team Governess' credibility instead through the woman's raw expression of unanticipated horror. Team Henry is baffled why the presence of the tip-off note does not hint to the police that Team Governess has sabotaged their own clueless member — until it occurs to the gang that the opposing team has of course intercepted and replaced the note.
The battle rages on. Lest you think art in the end is but a side character playing a parallel drama in the series, the governess notices striking resemblances between various artwork protagonists and Team Henry's fallen victims. Through intel gathered from the paintings and her network's extensive search, her team identifies past and future victims — henceforth surging in strength and thwarting its rivals' efforts in advance.
At long last, Team Governess emerges triumphant. Yet Henry himself is not as incensed as we would expect, because he chances upon a daughter from the aristocratic household he caught rats for at the beginning of the story. Now that family is in financial ruins, whereas Henry has built up a pest control company through the ties forged in his years-long rat trap ballet tutelage alliance. Henry marries the ballerina daughter, finally possessing his object of envy. The night before the wedding, he swears to God and himself, with all sincerity, that he will forever love and protect her with all his heart. On the other hand, the daughter, long used to being fawned on and held in awe, is not content to be some possession or object. Day in, day out, in a string of sights that ring a bell for us, she orders him around their house like an imperious king. So he seeks compensation again, from mistresses and pleasure houses.
Decades later, on his hospital bed while undergoing syphilis treatment, Henry is tended by a doctor remarkably resembling the woman in Vermeer's The Milkmaid. She is the recovered and exonerated Eliza's daughter. Somewhere in the hospital, a light bulb glows icy blue. The doctor knows nothing about the history between Eliza and Henry or about Team Governess and Team Henry. Neither does she care about any substratum of art history. Medical curiosity is the only dance in her head. She leads her students in photographing and documenting Henry's facial lesions, preserving his broken visage on instructional materials circulated in the medical fraternity countrywide. Medical ethics will catch up with her frenzied dance only after his death.
Spinoff Bubble: A slice-of-life mini-drama about Gil Woo-joo, a talented litigator who has become an in-house counsel after motherhood clashed with the billable hour requirement at her law firm. [Spoiler caution w.r.t. original series] Like another candidate for her new job, Law And The City's Bae Moon-jung, Woo-joo relished the thrilling court debates that came with her previous role. Not only that, court appearances and case-related fieldwork back then gave the cyclone-in-a-suit she's always been more excuses to travel around Seoul. Now, she often finds herself zombieing out in front of her cluttered dual monitor system, unable to muster even an ounce of energy to dive into her tasks. Thankfully, her remote-work-averse company miraculously grants her a private office she can retrofit to her heart's content. So the pumping of her brain juices is mercifully restored as she alternates between exercising on gym equipment decked out in the palette of Andy Warhol's Green Marilyn and juggling her Office document dramas, sometimes executing both at once.
Sample episodes are as follows:
Gym Court: Woo-joo lifts a kettlebell with alternate hands as she scans recent judicial rulings on negligent misrepresentation to assess the need to update her company's work policies. She's demoralized by her current perpetual presence as a mental spectator on the sidelines in the court system, unable to pipe in a word. As her eyes start to wander away from her monitors, she tightens her grasp of the kettlebell and forces herself to picture the parties arguing their cases among the gym equipment in the morning light. The parties morph into her and the judges dismantling each other's logic, both sides lobbing colorful weights across her office at their turns to speak. Frustrated, she impulsively types up a critique of a ruling as part of the post-legal review memo expected of her. But guilt creeps in. The imaginary litigation scene then morphs into two versions of her sparring among the equipment: her id and superego. Just when Id Woo-joo rages in triumph, a news alert pops up on her phone: the infant formula she has been feeding her newborn with has been recalled for bacteria levels that fall afoul of regulations. Clearly the manufacturer did not pay serious attention to its own lawyers. Superego Woo-joo solemnly seizes the message as an exhibit corroborating her case for to-the-point, concise corporate communications that distills legal facts unmuddied by personal opinions. With a wistful sigh, Ego Woo-joo at the desk deletes her critique.
Redlining Battles: Woo-joo stretches a resistance band tying her legs together while she rolls her eyes at the ego trips, slights and counter-attacks in the comment sections and other tracked changes in Word files. So much make-work as a result just to sooth secret personal insecurities, which are not so secret anymore when people fall all over themselves to project superiority. She reminds herself to be impartial and fact-focused as she adds her own edits and insights. During lunch hour, Woo-joo edits a richly detailed guest post for her infant care blog, absent-mindedly redlining paragraph after paragraph in her dream of a perfectly unforgettable, perfectly indispensable martial arts manual for new mothers. A meeting with a clumsy, understaffed vendor whose representative delusionally thinks he knows more about law than legal practitioners, including his one counsel, is about to start. Why does management stick with this company? She quickly sends the revised file to the guest blogger before rushing to the conference room. When she checks out Instagram to unwind at the end of the work day, she discovers that the learned guest blogger has unfollowed her.
Call Center / Cost Center: The bouncy stability ball Woo-joo poses on rocks gently as she answers calls and dictates to the voice-to-text software her replies to various emails. Today, her contact list is buzzing more than ever. Admin is lost in the math of the new customs duties labyrinth. (To think some law school applicants think their admission letters will be tickets to math-free heaven.) Corp Dev complains the M&A paperwork is taking forever. (Why is it always about your goals, your goals, and your goals? Some of us here have real jobs too. The potentially serious consequences of cunning clauses, ill-serving terminology and compliance failure, anyone? Law is not a package of paper towels.) Fancy Legaltech Startup is peddling legal research AI software with a 98%-effective hallucination filter. (Is it legit? AI hallucination filter or AI-hallucinated filter?) General counsel relays that a headcount boosting request has been rejected, grumbling about how their company sees the legal team as an inconvenient, money-sucking component in its vast money-making network. (She feels the stability ball deflate.) A partner at a law firm roped in to tackle specialized issues the team lacks deep expertise in offhandedly refers to Woo-joo as a non-legally trained person. (Ball explodes into colorful confetti, each strand of which reads, "😁You're not a real lawyer. 😁") Glaring at the hallucinatory confetti, Woo-joo sweetly arranges for an impromptu rapport-building Teams video call. With a steely smile, she stands up in front of the meeting participants and pans her monitor cam across a view of her graduation photos and vast array of gym equipment, onto which are tacked various legal readings and mottoes. Eyes pop, faces bend forward and print screen keys are tapped as she proclaims,
"Our most esteemed learned friend is onto something. I'm an illegally trained lawyer. The extremes I go to sharpen my craft and heighten discipline have always been criminally bonkers. Care to join some explosive glutes discovery hearings as we strategize the optimal way out of the regulatory quagmire?"
Your Legal Department, Your Quasi Law School: Woo-joo breezily hops back and forth between her rowing machine and her marine-themed presentation slides on flood risk disclosure regulations for the coastal real estate sales team. As an intrepid explorer, she absolutely loves how joining this company allows her to dive deep into the strategic thinking and construction work for different types of property. But more than that, she's always eager to infect as many victims as she can with her burning passion for her pet subjects, be they in law or parenting. As she gets more and more immersed in her slides, she actually forgets about the rowing machine. That sales team, however, barely gives her or her slides a glance during the briefing session. One member hardly bothers to disguise his yawn. Another concentrates on her iPad. And then noise from a porn clip suddenly rings out from a flustered third member's phone, drawing everyone's attention. An enraged Woo-joo immediately takes to her punching bag on return to her office. A broomstick flops to the ground. She turns around to see the janitor in her fifties at the door, who hesitantly asks if this is not the right time for their informal weekly evening lesson. Woo-joo sheepishly wipes her forehead and welcomes the janitor in to teach the older woman more about constitutional law. As they pore over the books and notes, Woo-joo thinks back fondly about how she herself picked up tidbits about various legal topics from a kindly female attorney as a young girl following her harried paralegal mom to work.
Marilyndom: Woo-joo hangs from — w-WHAT did you just say?! —a suspension trainer as she focuses intently on the governmental approval tracking system the general counsel has given her permission to set up. (Apprehensive fitness coaches among the viewers watch intently too.) She's more than an explorer — she's a builder. Chances for building up ingenious legal arguments for unchangeable misadventures may not be as aplenty as in her previous job, but here's a golden chance to build up a sophisticated immune system that nips those misadventures in the bud. With all the requirements, deadlines, documentation, statuses and sign-offs in one place, compliance is now a streamlined and more error-free experience for everyone. Feel free to call her Microsoft Warhol despite her lack of painterly acumen. As Power Automate workflows and her self-coded (✌️) JSON scripts give shape to the approval tracking system hosted on SharePoint, this show finale starts to visualize the process as the installation of equipment in a sprawling gym industrial complex that inherits her gear's color scheme. Flashbacks to Woo-joo's struggles in the series follow, with each memory shrinking into a video-filled shape of a human figure working out in the complex. As the ending theme plays, we overhear a job offer from a one-of-a-kind boutique law firm with mom-friendly minimum billables and another wistful sigh from Woo-joo as our empire founder-protector replies that she has to consider.
Some drama industry players may despair that the wealth of local source materials they draw on — documented history and intellectual property like novels and comics — cannot quite compete with their global rivals', believing that these limit the range of their output. Such a notion is indeed the food for thought offered by a Redditor comparing Korean and Chinese historical series. Yet time point and art form are not the only dimensions to stories. To the degree there is a wide diversity of ways of life at any point in time, including the here and now, in any locale, there is a rich breadth of life experiences to mine for storytelling. As this spinoff illustrates, with a little verve and imagination, we can cast a funky spotlight onto lesser known professions. The end result is more than successful entertainment; it's further opportunities for under-resourced young people to better understand their career options. Do not dismiss any chance to make the world a slightly better place.
Metadrama Bubble: An ex-delivery rider, Nick, left maimed and jobless by a horrific accident is on a bus ride home one night, with his ominous bottle of sleeping pills as the only fellow passenger, when the bus passes by a colossal billboard showing a maiden in flowing white damask robes lying on a snowy ground, the frigid wind slowly sweeping aside her long hair to reveal cheek scars patterned like clusters of dandelions. The slogan on the streaming series ad reads, "Pining for the saddest truth in the universe." Unable to shake off the image, he casts aside the bottle of doom in favor of his grubby cellphone in his bare, dingy apartment, bingeing the entire series about the rivalry between a wronged general who sacrifices for her and a dark knight she sacrifices for in hope of redeeming despite the latter's unwanted attention. Hollow feelings at the conclusion of the story then lead him down the rabbit hole of the wider Internet, where databases and fan discussions introduce him to inspired works and source materials with similarly scarred and terrorized tragic female characters. Never does he expect Baroque at the end of the burrow although hindsight will say he totally should.
As Nick wanders from plot to plot, we see him as the leading man in each tale even as the actress changes to reflect the different real-life casting. He casts forlorn gazes at the maiden in all her iterations, his inner monologues on their cross-narrative fates audible only to us. We are also the sole witnesses to his pain whenever he struggles in vain to convey his own romantic feelings or override plot orchestration of his movements, like ignoring or hurting the maiden himself as hypermasculine character archetypes are wont to. There are humorous turns all the same, as when the maiden's appearance as a pair of supernatural twins in a webtoon (which is nevertheless depicted in live-action format for us) sets Nick's head spinning, when she is relegated to a motionless goddess statue with a tumultuous but unacted backstory and he overlays his pompous kingly orders on taxes and governmental promotions from a resplendent throne with inward curses of the synopsis for click-baiting, and when he wildly misunderstands what his character is about to do in an entirely untranslated foreign language series.
Since dandelion-scarred maidens are a new trend, Nick soon exhausts almost the entire body of works and has to toe-paste queries all over message channels and bulletin boards and plumb the deep web for more traces of them. Sometimes the paucity of responses leaves him feeling as if the legions of usually vocal female pop culture fans can see through his screen and zero in on the stumps he has had for arms since the accident. Seeing him, that is to say, as a freak who's not one of their kind. Just when it seems his world will forever be one expansive, non-flowering polar desert from now on, Nick discovers the originator in a crumpled eBay graphic novel from an obscure country which language he thankfully speaks due to his family's history. The vividness of the visuals and intricate tapestry of historio-cultural references hold her precious in their center and sweep him off his feet even more so than the many works he's already been immersed in, like a lavish banquet thrown before the collective end of humanity. And then, the book is over as well. The maiden quietly, sadly returns his final kiss, all while a tiny clear stream of tears streak down her pearl-powdered dandelion scars, before a raging snowstorm erases her exquisite yet vulnerable visage once and for all.
Unwilling to put aside the maiden, a bleary-eyed Nick scours for more works by the graphic novelist. Two lines in an interview catch his eye:
"Life is fleeting. So I approach my writing process like an indigent chef bent on luxury despite his circumstances, throwing all observations of the colorful life I see around into my wok and then elevating them into palpable magic that I myself would like to be kept awake at night with as a reader."
There is hope after all, one truly last version of her that he may yet find — right inside that eternally frustrating, endlessly bleak and all-too-familiar story he and many of us know as Real Life. It does not matter that her scars are not exactly dandelion-shaped. Nick fires off an email to the graphic novelist.
The country Nick steps out to from the long train journey, the payment for which feels like a surrender of more fingers in his unemployed state, is certainly underrated. The fiction carries your soul away. The food holds your belly hostage. You might begrudge these wiles but then the leafy, surprisingly well-manicured streets have an air of nostalgic innocence that leaves the weary child in you all too content to be in town in the first place. Nick heads to the café the graphic novelist said he worked out of until three years ago.
He seats himself in the corner described by the graphic novelist in a magazine essay, nervously making sure his jacket sleeves are thick and long enough to minimize attention to where his lower arms should be so that he does not frighten the maiden on the off chance she is still a regular there. On the other hand, he has no idea how to identify her rather than some other scarred or sorrowful-looking person with certainty. The graphic novelist remarked wistfully in his email reply, lapsing from a more conversational style to the dramatic tone used in the book, that any dedicated reader can recognize her at a glance if her habits remain unchanged. Meanwhile, unabashedly soaring, grand Vivaldi music booms during the start of lunch hour, a practice that calls forth patrons from the surroundings even as it draws resigned sighs from those in the midst of serious conversations.
Nick gets the remark on the third day in the café which plays Vivaldi once a day. At a window draped by dandelion-patterned gauze curtains, a mild-mannered woman decked out in white lays down the many transparent cases of her laptop and stationery items, the way the graphic novel's ancient maiden always picks snow-white flowing gowns and shining transparent cultural accessories despite the explosions of color all around her. As the woman, lovely despite the seven years that have flown by since she was copied into the graphic novel, types away, the gauze curtains flutter in front of her and let their dandelion motifs cross her blemish-less cheeks. Mesmerized, Nick has to suppress his tears at the dream he is sitting in.
When she packs up for the day, Nick suddenly recalls her many tormentors in the book. Are they based on real-life sightings too? Uneasy, he follows her through many streets as discreetly as he can, but also casting steely glances at the many potentially predatory passersby. When she finally stops at a place, her exasperated growl startles him. He looks up to see the sign of a police station closed today for renovation. She turns on him with her transparent camera phone.
"This will be your [expletive] prison mugshot, you [expletive] armless, foul-colored, parasitic, idle slug with no need to work!"
A crowd forms around them as more of her colorful expletives and simultaneous demonstration of ableism, racism and lookism explode on. He stares dumbfounded like a wounded intruding beast at the large ring of locals pointing fingers at him, an alien stalker. Carried away by her desperate anger until then, the woman grabs a renovation signboard. Gasps and shrieks emerge from the crowd as she slams it onto his face, where it breaks on impact. But then the woman shrinks in horror at the broken pieces and his bruised face, stares at her trembling hands and crouches down in anguished wails.
At a police station further away, where Nick and the woman have now been led to, he learns about her history. A string of nasty experiences at the hands of school restroom bullies in her teenage years has imprinted the bullies' vicious styles and shallow thought patterns onto her mind. Even decades on, her instinctive behavior is to detect in an instant the fault lines of people in the environment and attack them like a razor-sharp, blood-hungry sniper, especially when she senses danger. All the same, guilt and shame of perpetuating what she abhors and has suffered from trouble her. To stop hurting anyone, she has withdrawn from socialization and browbeaten herself into acting the complete opposite of what she feels at any moment. And so what the world sees is a gentle, dreamy creative who would not harm even a fly. This reveal is a genre Nick has never expected to land in since the days he binged the streaming series.
Back in his country, after clearing up the incident and exchanging apologies, Nick flicks on another grimy device, this time a laptop hauled from a dumpster dive, and starts typing out a plot set in the stuffy, gritty, unmagical reality you and I live in. He still does not have an income. He will not be a great writer straight away. He may in fact never secure any streaming deal in his lifetime. He still wants to end his life. But the woman's unromantic story away from the male gaze, away from onlookers' needs and ideals, away from the epic rhythms that viewers so often want to be swept away in and that creators so often want to emulate, has left its own scars on and assignment for him. Never mind again that the scars look too little like dandelions to Nick because humans are much messier and more complicated than flowers. So, he continues to reach for a device instead of the pill bottle this night, and the next night, and the nights that follow still.
Remake Bubble: A titillating, refreshing narrative approach that shakes up dramalands through an adaptation of the official social media account snarkily roleplaying the assistive writing software which punishes The Journey Of Legend / Go To The Mountains And Sea's protagonist, a fan fiction author, for dodging hard work after he attempts to give his lead character rapid power-ups.
We retrace The Journey, i.e. the quests of the author thrown into the martial arts novel his work is based on, through the lens — sporadically but menacingly glitching popup windows with classier-than-thou glassy frames, in fact — of the software, hearing its mischievous, spiteful comments, sometimes to him and sometimes to us, heavily sprinkled as it constantly evaluates his progress and the production team's story structure (invented examples: "These corporate rats, they think they can do the writing job a million times better, but they can never, ever, recall all the crucial details in the original plot! How convenient for our team." "I knew it, Monsieur I Want Autonomy. You'll just fall in love with the character the plot matchmakes for you, like your 1,109 predecessors in the soul transmigration industry. *smirking emoji*"). Acknowledgments of his growth and personal sacrifices over the course of his adventures are made by it too, in a patronizing fashion at first, and then with remote, spectral gasps, followed finally by more and more uncontrollable outbursts of genuine cheers and salutes. Rest assured that adjustments to the original plot will be made as necessary to fit the changes. At various intervals, the adaptation switches to mockumentary mode by re-enacting the account's golden exchanges with netizens, paying tribute to the wit and wordplay talent. It's like streaming a series with all those timed comments from effusive and observant viewers — and hearing the creators' responses out loud at long last.
Granted, it is unclear whether sufficient fans are willing to rewatch the entire story, whether through this radical format or otherwise, in the fast-moving entertainment market so that the adaptation can be released in a future near enough for the tribute to matter. So we'll have to keep fingers crossed that future soul transmigration dramas take inspiration from this proposal to keep the genre fresh and express more appreciation for passionate marketing teams — social media interns included — whose stylistic flair rivals or even outshines the writing crews. Which are really the more important goals.
Before eyes roll over for elusive "X" buttons on the popup windows, check out some of those actual exchanges:
Lonely as snow
Mó Diǎn (lit. "Magic Compendium" or "Demonic Compendium"), the software: Life as a demon inside a screen is truly lonely as snow.
Branches Of Peach Waves, a netizen: What's so lonely about your life?? You're messing with Qiushui (the protagonist) all day long. And you say you're lonely!!
Mó Diǎn: Peerlessness, it's such a lonely state.
Blue Planet Study Tour No. 7, a netizen: It's messing with him out of loneliness.
System cold temperature warning
Mó Diǎn: [System cold temperature warning] The system is about to barge into your life with mighty force. Please reply on receipt.
Main official drama account: The almighty demonic system is coming!!! Scream, shriek, run!!!
Mó Diǎn: Be calm.
Sweetie Little Cannon, a netizen: The demonic system has descended upon Earth! Be a lil kinder to Qiushui, please?
Mó Diǎn: System unable to decipher this request.
Gibberish as a native tongue
Mó Diǎn: (Reacting to the main account's character relationship chart) So Many People.jpg Looking at them makes me **+89h%#%#！3……
Bowl of Nonsense Speech Glutinous Rice Balls, a netizen: The language system of this Mó Diǎn software doesn't seem very good.
Mó Diǎn: Human, yours demon truly was so overwhelmed with emotion there was a bit of malfunction.
Stay in character more often in your next reincarnation, Your Mójesty.
Ya trembling earthlings should note that the images were posted by the role-playing promotional account, but not in the contexts above. Emojis and hashtags have been omitted from the quotes above.
Orphan Series Bubble: A justice minister seized by the idea of retitling all principal executive officers of financially healthy yet mass layoff-conducting corporations as Chief Mustard Officer and the like on government and judiciary websites and documents until the affected headcount or unemployment changes are reversed pushes through her totally bonkers plan in the country of Propriety. Her subordinates cannot dissuade her. Corporate and legal traditionalists first laugh it off as a literal joke, then scoff at the paperwork and bill readings, before rolling their eyes as energized proletarians, especially the litigation-shy who formerly believed law would always favor the rich and powerful, rally in support. Companies in fear of PR nightmares start playing a cat-and-mouse game with the legislation and its numerous amendments through underhanded asset management strategies, creative accounting, lobbying for redefinition of financial health, intensified workforce outsourcing, and C-suite redesigns — to the jeers and boos of a public which sees them as covetous cowards who lack the spine to keep the mustard labels in exchange for the enormous wealth they pocket. News-hungry reporters and long-aggrieved activists fervently refresh the government's business database like new mustard titles are their IV drips.
Things come to a head as corporate heavyweights successfully champion for the creation of a Bureau For Neutering Under-substantiated Thriftlessness (Bureau For NUTS) that identifies and eliminates financial inefficiencies in the operation of public agencies, resulting in the uncoincidental downsizing of the justice ministry. The corporate heavyweights do not hesitate to sling mud at the minister for her supposed hypocrisy, but not for long because she gamely retitles herself as Mustard Minister of Julienne Justice for failing to stop the bureau in its tracks. That gives them a brainwave, however. They pivot to treating mustard titles as fun wordplay in a "show of solidarity with our most courageous minister," inserting vegetable names into other company roles. Companies begin to adopt mustard titles before any retrenchment exercise, all while anticipating future layoffs. The selfish mustard phenomenon is now all over the land, despite much ridicule and teasing abroad.
But then the country slips into its most dire economic doldrums in half a century. Business thought leaders, covertly nudged by those same heavyweights, pin a large part of the blame on the justice minister's reckless damage to Propriety's international reputation. Desperate for financial stability, the citizens come round to a campaign for devegging corporate images and for ousting of the minister.
Not one to rest on her laurels, the fired and ostracized justice minister taps into her old hobby and sets up, of all things, a cooking school where students craft mustard-filled puffs in the shapes of teddy bears and give them loving cream baths. The specific ingredients and styling of the mustard teddy bears vary with the unjustified mass layoff of the month — blueberry-cradling dwarfish mustard bears popping up in the wake of Big Blue Metaverse's "rightsizing efforts," "poor chickenpox-infected" mustard bears covered all over with red hot chili flakes and swiftly served after ChiliTechie, INC.'s "man-hours surplus management exercise," etc. Times are hard, yet the hilariously cathartic experiences prove a draw with disgruntled workers, including some who backed her ousting but find her pastries harmless. This school grows into a multinational franchise with both physical and online outlets, propelling the justice minister, or rather, ex-justice minister into the ranks of billionaires.
Many Years Later. The world is a different place, with the merger of various international financial bodies into a new mega-entity, the World Shared Prosperity Organization (WSPO). Nonetheless, the difference is only slight, as global economic inequality persists and cross-border trade wars flare on. Anxious to remain relevant, the WSPO revamps its procedures and scouts for a leader with an illustrious track record of private sector success hitherto unseen in its predecessors' histories. The smirking minister-turned-billionaire-turned-WSPO chief's first order of the day? The international mustardization of global talent-underutilizing corporations, effected for the systematic dismantling of entrenched barriers of blandness to trade.
Element Transformation + Metadrama Bubble: Characters bewildered by their increasingly erratic Golden Beads-dynasty costume drama world find an evasive newcomer in their midst. Their persistent investigation unveils her as a 39-year-old lone screenwriter close to the cusp of a career breakthrough thanks to the ensemble of multi-layered, colorful characters bringing alive the emotional landscape of a gloriously intricate plot scheme, except that she has been afflicted with early-onset Alzheimer's disease and inexplicable fibromyalgia that wreak havoc on her work. Daydreams that she embarks on to escape physical realities made more and more unfamiliar by her cognitive loss transport her to the drama world now and then. Mad at the screenwriter, many characters proceed to prosecute and burn her at the stake. Nevertheless, sympathy comes over them as they witness how the forgetful, lost woman is more paranoid about and baffled by her own drama creation than they are. Pallor and emaciation, too, show up on her with time as enraged viewers attack her online and the studio cancels their multi-year contract. The fictional monarchs, flute players, martial arts heroes and townsfolk are no more able to alter the ending of her real-life story than they are to restore coherence to their storylines. Yet they come to surround her with warmth and love whenever the dazed screenwriter finds herself in their world, feeding her their impossibly glittery candied lotus roots and forever-steaming osmanthus cakes and wrapping colorful thick blankets over her as she naps in utter exhaustion on their rainbowy canopy beds. The end.
NAQ (Never-Asked Questions)
Golden Beads dynasty?
Culturally and materially the golden age of the make-believe empire's convoluted history. But wealth never guarantees happiness for the wealthy (it does improve their relative happiness) or livable income for the poor. Neither does it put an end to interstate rivalry. On the other hand, with a screenwriter losing track of her own world mechanics and plot lines, wars can terminate for no reason. Moreover, troops' morale flags as soldiers learn about the story nature of their world and how they are doing stuff just to entertain callous people on another dimension.
WHAT?!?! Who the devil calls me callous for watching my favorite dramas?
Relax. The meta-drama proposal speaks to a hypothetical. There is no more evidence to suggest drama characters possess sentience than to suggest chatbots possess sentience. Even the viewers in the meta-drama are callous only to the extent that they mock any insufficiency of gore and carnage not for lack of realism but for lack of emotional thrills. They have no reason to be aware of that sentience. If, however, you are the (presumed) minority who treat the inhumane wars in Gaza and Ukraine as entertainment, you are definitely callous with a capital C. While we're on the topic, here's a reminder to ourselves to not stop caring about the suffering in the two places.
Curious, curious. Exactly how erratic is the drama world becoming?
Emperors and empresses in the in-show production, Legends Of Legends Of Legends, switch identities overnight. A general's mistress turns into his birth mother, to their mutual disgust. Dead enemies return to life like nothing has ever happened. Farmers wake up to find scorching deserts where their lush rice terraces were. And the original deserts? Now silkworm farms. Extras stare in wonder as the leading couple exchanges sweet nothings and smooches all while standing on cliffs separated by a wide river (which flows in two directions!). Whelp, at least the last two phenomena have their upsides. And characters are flummoxed but not at all complaining about how their hands autonomically spin out banquets from gusts of wind.
Seriously? Nobody on the production team flagged the ginormous errors before the drama aired?
They're on a tight schedule hemmed in by location booking constraints and the leading cast's other major work commitments. It does not help that the egoistic producers perceive their target audience as brainless women who buy anything as long as the romance concentration is sky-high. To the team's minor credit, some of the wildest mistakes do get skipped over during shooting or edited out, though characters still experience them in their world.
Are you suggesting that we tolerate every mistake by screenwriters? What about the time we wasted on train wrecks?
We certainly need to provide screenwriters with detailed postmortems and constructive feedback. But sending death threats? That is disproportionate to the harm they cause, which in most cases is not even about advocating violence to or persecution of some group or individual. Or calling for a newbie to never touch a pen again, just because of one flop? Clearly excessive too. Extended mentorship, practice, feedback and personal conditioning are the remedies to try out first. Brutal critics appear to neglect how difficult it can be to find a job that fits one's kooky circumstances and dreams, when life has a penchant for walking out on economics. Pushing a writer out of the writing industry may well be pushing her into eternal unemployment.
As with many other artistic professions, screenwriters often have to put up with long periods of unstable, deficient income and cope with numerous environmental and resource constraints. In 2011, a time where starvation should already be a story of the past in South Korea, a film director-writer, Choi Ko-eun, literally starved to death, aged only 32. If we demand that shows respect our time and money, can we also demand that production executives invest time, money and other necessary support to screenwriters, who don't possess infallible bodies?
Lastly, we tend to treat people in their 30s like they have a long runway ahead of them. The truth is life is unpredictable, and a growing trend of cancers among under-50s, including those still in their 20s, has been observed worldwide. The prospect of fading into physiological and economic obsolescence before you gain professional success is very real. Cherish life. Be nice to each other, whether you care about dramas or not.
Platform Bubble: A therapeutic cloud avatar game that simultaneously reflects on how the people we engage with bring us closer to or pull us further away from the kinds of individuals we aspire to become. Along the journey, players traverse ethereal cloud worlds from different literary, electronic and artistic works, both licensed and original.
"Nomeleon" is a portmanteau coined from the words nomad and chameleon. The only variables of each player's visual identity she herself can fully control are the anatomical features and relative size of her avatar. This avatar is a cloud with fluffy extensions mimicking animal head components. At the beginning of the game, the player gets to pick or even draw these extensions at the places where her cloud can grow those cloud ears, cloud pupils, cloud snout and cloud whiskers. The 2D drawn extensions will be rendered into 3D fluffy shapes on the final cloud. The relative size is selected from among a finite set of choices, allowing the player to keep a lower profile or loom over other player clouds depending on her wishes. The cloud color, on the other hand, is programmatically determined through an MBTI questionnaire, though always of some pastel shade. Unlike typical MBTI results, however, the output accommodates ties in any of the four dimensions of personality tested (extraversion—introversion, sensing—intuition, thinking—feeling and judging—perceiving), such that players are not arbitrarily slotted into one or the other side of a dichotomy that should really be a spectrum. Every dimension contributes to the color assignment, so the total number of initial cloud colors possible is (2+1)⁴=81. As detailed further ahead, the cloud color will change to some degree each time with cooperation with other player clouds. To account for organic personality changes over time yet minimize the risk of players submitting insincere answers to gun for particular cloud colors, the player can retake the questionnaire but only after a certain number of months and only when new sets of questions have been made available on the platform.
The cloud worlds are directionally connected to but not visible from each other. We'll dive into the specifics later. But first, on completion of the avatar, the new player is randomly assigned to one of the cloud worlds, where she can select either of two modes: de-stressing or exploring. In both cases, the experience can be enhanced through virtual reality headsets.
In the de-stressing mode, she can join unwinding sessions that are conducted alone or together with masses of player clouds depending on the theme of the cloud world. Two types of rhythmic activities are offered in the company of chill music in these sessions: breathing exercises and rocking naps. Depending on the day and the theme of the cloud world, the breathing exercise can take the form of box breathing, 4-7-8 breathing, pursed lip breathing, alternate nostril breathing, belly breathing, lion's breath, etc. Together with perky verbal instructions, the swelling and shrinking of the cloud face and the shapes of its snout and mouth in a close-up view guide the player through the steps of each breathing exercise. To spur exploration of more cloud worlds, some breathing exercises are exclusive to a small number of cloud worlds, the set of which differs from one rare exercise to another. Any player who opts for a rocking nap has the option to turn her cloud avatar invisible during the nap, leaving only an unlabeled tiny glow of light in her place from other player clouds' perspectives. Nonetheless, she is visible to herself as a highly translucent cloud. During the nap, the player cloud adopts soporific motions inspired by visual ASMR and backed by robust human trials (not that any trial already conducted by now is necessarily robust). Brace yourself for what happens next. Players with the financial means can sit back in Internet-connected, body-sized sensory pads that can be draped over hammocks, beds or chairs. The pad motions are synchronized with the cloud motions, ideally inducing sleep in the players by and by. On detection of 15 minutes of sleep through a sensing chest belt strapped to the pad, the system can power down itself to conserve energy. Alternatively, players can set an alarm or broadcast of energetic game music that jolts them awake after a fixed duration.
The exploring mode is where the simulations of identity dynamics come fully alive. A greater incentive for that exploration lies in diverse world-building fed by a broad range of source materials. Cloud textures, contours and arrangements as well as landscapes beneath and game quests vary greatly from level to level. On one level, players drift over William Wordsworth's vales and hills in a world with no non-player cloud and try to spot daffodil fields from afar, over which they then attempt to match the gay flowers' dance steps. On another, they bounce on painter Georgia O'Keeffe's minimalist depictions of cloud expanses backlit from time to time in changing bands of surreal colors, basking in certain elusive bands as quest goals. On yet others, they wander around the meditative electronic game Monument Valley's smoky clouds-surrounded, Escherish platforms to chaperone its forgiveness-seeking princess or they offer up themselves as mattresses for exhausted storks fetching sometimes dangerous babies from personified majestic clouds in animated short Partly Cloudy's busy, baby-bundling thick cloudscapes. Lest we forget, obvious quests would also abound for the deity-transporting clouds in the ancient Eastern novel Journey To The West's cloud world, which can naturally be rendered as a grand 3D ink wash painting. Except for solitariness-themed cloud worlds like Wordsworth's and Georgia O'Keeffe's, quests can be completed through solo or group effort.
Solo effort suffices for physically smaller targets like tinier storks and lighter deities, whereas group effort is essential for larger ones. The caveat is that the core RGB values of each cooperating player cloud will morph to a certain degree in color directions dependent on the MBTI profiles and recent MBTI contacts of player clouds in the group, with the fine RGBA values for the highlights, midtones and shadows of the cloud then adjusted accordingly. What is invisible is subsequent transformation of the MBTIs in this group into a representative value set integrated together with the core RGB into a matrix stored as part of the player profile in the platform database. Upon the player's next cooperation encounter, that value set is to be programmatically retrieved as evaluation of recent MBTI contacts and updated. Different sets of MBTIs have different color interactions. Some MBTI combinations generate no immediate color change but their effect on the value set can affect the player cloud's color change in future cooperation encounters. Achievement of some minimum number of goals grants the player the visa to travel to adjacent levels. Players who meet higher goal thresholds can travel directly to more distant levels. Turbocharge ahead or hang around to work only with buddies with known MBTIs and known player cloud contact histories for artistic safety? It's a dilemma for aesthetes who dread winding up with a sickly avatar color they absolutely detest.
The conundrum does not end there. The visa is valid for only one journey across levels, so players have to earn new visas each time they wish to exit any level. In addition, just as real-life visas are useless without some mode and route of transportation, players must find teleportation points at remote corners of cloud worlds and send themselves upwards or downwards from there. These teleportation points co-locate as a pair on each level. Players can discover the points all by themselves or by querying passerby player clouds by moving their own cloud avatars in such a way that the avatars draw an imaginary question mark in the air, in response to which those passerby clouds would gesture towards the locations through their own movements or perform a fluffy shrug if they are unsure or clueless. No doubt everyone has to be mentally prepared for pranksters. To encourage kindness anyway, the platform logs correct direction-guiding gestures detected through AI and sparks a five-minute undulating glow in each helping player cloud when a guided player cloud successfully lands on another level. The objective, nonetheless, is not to forestall pranks altogether, since this is a game contemplating interpersonal dynamics.
Teleportation occurs after the following sequence: (1) a player cloud chooses a luminous Up or Down arrow floating at those points, (2) spots of lights in a pattern matching the theme of the cloud world manifest nearby, and (3) other player clouds heap themselves around and/or onto the initiating player cloud in the positions of the light spots to form a cloud cairn in the required shape. Cloud colors and player data will be updated once more in accordance with the MBTI profiles and recent MBTI contacts of player clouds in the cairn. If one arrow has been chosen for an occupied teleportation point, only an arrow in the opposite direction will be available for selection at the neighboring point, so color-fussy players have to choose between compromise and perhaps Zen-style patience.
There is no end point for the game. More licensed cloud levels will fluff up the platform universe and sustain interest as other cloud works emerge in the global cultural landscape. So will cloud levels based on new staff and users' idea submissions. Players also have an in-game camera function that facilitates snapshots of their colorful cloud cairns and other cooperation moments. These snapshots are accessible on a virtual personal scrapbook.
Rest assured, though, that if you decide to keep to a core cloud color deemed inferior by others, never mind your glacial game progress, neither the sweet daffodils, the atonement-seeking princess, nor even the almighty Monkey King will judge. Just don't judge any other cloud color either!
Merch Bubble: A series of cookbooks in which (1) recipes are nestled naturally within light, contemporary fantasy anthologies and (2) food graphics comprise rich illustrations rendered in a fusion of traditional Korean ink wash techniques and whimsical, multi-hued backdrops. Heaven is a place where residents escape starvation by feeding one another, as a parable goes, and this cozy collab shall have writers, artists and culinary experts supporting one another so that the often low-paid crafts of fiction writing and AI-threatened print art can find a breather in the roaring cookbook market, which still reported growth in 2024. No doubt either that Empyrean Ditties On 2D Bikes is the franchise title.
"Empyrean" may strike non-religious people not fond of literary language as an obscure and thus reader-unfriendly word choice but this potential rejuvenation of a poetic vocabulary term sidelined in everyday contexts would symbolize the gifting of a lifeline to the vulnerable crafts. If you have looked up the term and are already familiar with the inspiration for this proposal, you can also see that it is very much a part of the reference to the Korean drama which slice-of-life fantasy subplot practically spells out part (1) of the concept: A lonely man who died at the tender age of five some time after waiting in vain for his mother in front of a church waits on for her as a pastor in heaven. His only parishioner for the most part is the elderly heroine of Heavenly Ever After dispatched to his long-empty, small celestial church to make up for her rude, aggressive habits. She dozes off swiftly at his sermons but brightens quickly at the sight of grub, except that he's a subpar cook. So their church sessions morph into cooking sessions, complete with sun-kissed shots of the hearty meals.
[Spoiler caution w.r.t. original series] Wondering if the heroine might be God's answer to his prayer, the usually prickly pastor calls her "Mom" in a charged moment, yet she obliviously replies that she has been childless all her life. He covers up his embarrassment by claiming that he was pulling her leg. The heroine generously offers to be his adoptive mother or mother in name, to his gruff annoyance, sounding like he is some sad little puppy to her. All the same, the heart that prompts the amnesiac woman to keep turning up at the church to feed the pastor for all sorts of reasons must have known the truth all along.
The cookbooks shall sustain such warmth and hope, and more.
Merch Bubble: A petition for Studio Ghibli to best OpenAI by channeling the 2025 trend of cheery citrus-juiced images into an endeavor with more lasting impact — revamping the image of math and captivating young learners through geometry problem sets jazzed up with visuals and story contexts from its films.
Picture the following in their relevant aesthetic backdrops:
Estimate the height Spirited Away's Chihiro successfully descends despite her fear as she speeds down a rickety stairway section with 20 horizontal steps. Each gap between the steps is 5 units in slope and 4 units in width.
Spirited Away's No-Face tries out a circular mask 3 units in radius. Its holes for his eyes are 0.3 units in radius. How many times larger in area is his fake face compared to his fake eyes?
He next tries out a fancy circular mask which outline circumscribes tightly-packed, non-overlapping circles each 0.3 units in radius. The circles are made up of k rings of six circles surrounding one circle. Two of those hexagonally packed circles form holes for his eyes. How many times larger in area is his fake face compared to his fake eyes?
Witch Kiki in Kiki's Delivery Service is on a 10-unit long broomstick tilted at 45 degrees as she takes freshly baked cinnamon rolls to a customer. As she passes by a tall structure, she notices its tip is labeled 10, 000 units. The rolls are in a 2-unit long satchel hanging halfway on the broom. Since the temperature of the air affects how fast pastries go stale, she wonders: How far are the rolls from the ground?
A bunch of kids are squeezing onto the ginormous, fluffy tummy of the furry creature Totoro from My Neighbor Totoro. Predict how many kids can stay on the tummy given the relevant simplifications, assumptions and information. (You already got the drift.)
Make no mistake. There's much virtue in the uncluttered designs of typical math worksheets: faster concept rendering, faster information perception, lower workloads, lower technical requirements and lower production costs. One might sum them up as higher time, resource and cost efficiencies. Add to those pros a potential cultivation of academic asceticism on the learners' part. That would be efficiency as well, in the sense that we meet two student developmental goals (math and discipline) in one shot.
In eyeing these efficiencies, however, teachers and allied industry players may be neglecting their numerator terms, most of which concern learner progress. That is ironically where pure quantitative logic breaks down. We are all emotional creatures. That is all the more so, all things equal, in young people whose brains are still underdeveloped. Looking around, we can see many school leavers who have not matured in time to take full advantage of educational resources temporally and financially accessible only in early life stages. Nor have they met adult figures sufficiently skilled in the elusive art of mathematical motivation. By the time such school leavers gain an appetite for delayed gratification, austere thinking as well as for the inherent beauty in quantitative subjects, adulthood commitments and sociocultural barriers like ageist biases often deter or delay their reentry into the educational system, threatening their scholastic journey and any STEM career trajectory. There is therefore a case to be made for deep yet down-to-earth arts-based engagement of apathetic young learners, many of whom struggle to perceive the relevance of abstract fields like geometry and find math problems in general mundane, through instructor-independent means. The emotional resonance and relatability of Studio Ghibli's works — evinced through their box office successes and the controversial generative art trend applying a warm, effusive and rustic Ghibli style to personal images — would make them powerful helpmates in battles against math hate viruses, which feel as far-reaching as influenza bugs.
Even engagement of kids who will become non-STEM high-fliers can make a huge difference. Ever heard of the phrase "The medium is the message"? Our communication approaches communicate values and signals beyond what our content says. In denying all exuberant expressions of emotion and wonder a place in mathematical materials, even in the face of learners impaired by hopelessness despite their best efforts, adults are reinforcing perceptions of mathematics experts as inflexible, unfeeling and boring nerds. The persistence of those stereotypes in spite of genial, approachable educators painstakingly passing down the magical field's legacy of ingenious problem-solving tactics to students is unfair. And the few pops of color in worksheets that do try to inject fun are not enough to make a strong counter-statement. In the end, non-STEM high-fliers inherit the math as well as the stereotypes, perpetuating the latter in everyday life interactions and media portrayals. Reversal of such perpetuated negativity may spur more kids, especially counterparts who struggle in non-STEM careers and could have flourished in STEM careers, to persevere in the subject and widen their career options.
Ghibli geometry should not distract attention from school-based or educational ecosystem solutions like sharing of best pedagogical practices since they involve different chief solution architects. Content drafting may be accomplished by Studio Ghibli through the blending of its imagery and story contexts with licensed, existing geometry problem sets, leaving only an ideally quick task of expert review to math educators. Moreover, pedagogy discussions and Ghibli-related visuals occupy different influential niches. One speaks to educators, from whom successful translation of advice into action is not guaranteed. The other speaks directly to students.
The existence of entertaining math video clips and games does not obliterate the potential value of Studio Ghibli's math creations either. Unlike graphics that can be transferred onto printouts, video engagement prolongs device usage, already a hot issue of concern in today's youth climate. Moreover, no math clip or game to date has matched the cultural reach and memeability of Ghibli works. The maker of a long string of fantasy films has big shoes no mortal teacher, Tiktoker, YouTuber or software developer can readily fill.
A formidable rival to pop culture, on the other hand, is pop culture itself. This proposal can be generalized to cover a wide array of quantitative subjects and popular screen brands, except that it can be problematic to bring investigations of real-world physics into universes governed by supernatural forces.
By and by, we may even wean captivated students off fancy elements after the relevant aesthetics and narrative structures coax them to develop a fondness for the subjects' intermingling of order and surprises. The capacity for such standalone devotion can stand them in good stead in professional lives dotted all over with mundane but vital to-dos. But first, we need that captivation.
Element Hybridization + Transformation Bubble: Can there be loveless love? Is a woman no less impassive than the celebrated male heroes of the Korean masterpieces A Beautiful Mind and Stranger a lesser person?
"Who can appreciate a (pure) lotus flower's possession of only grudges and no passion?"
— Line from Tang dynasty poet Lu Guimeng's White Lotus
An overworked nanny in an aristocratic household in a fictional part of ancient East Asia finally catches a break to return to her village, only to find it flattened out in a mudslide. Her four boisterous kids and granny have been fatally trapped in their dingy home, while her husband has drowned in the mud waters in his valiant attempt to reach them. Slumped in confusion, then desperation, then impotent rage and anguish at the edge of a lotus pond nearby, she stares at the beautiful flowers, spitting at how hypocritical it is that these revered plants can rise unblemished from mud whereas the humans she cherishes, also creations of Nature, can only perish. All the years she has toiled away changing the cloth diapers of others' infants and feeding them instead of her own with her milk have been in vain. The thunderstorm that triggered the mudslide may be over but her streams of tears ripple the pond surface like rain that knows no end.
The bereaved woman stays in that position for three days. By the time her last tear dries, though, a mysterious calm has washed over her. She notices the petals of the lotus closest to her subtly, rhythmically opening and closing like a warbling child. When she plucks the lotus and pries open its center, the roars, shrieks and wails previously in her heart burst forth from the inside of the lotus. That is the genesis of the Mu Sect, mu being its reference to emotional nothingness (mushim, mushin, etc. in various languages and dialects).
In the decades to come, parents who would have sent their emotionally troubled daughters to nunneries, as was the tradition, send them to the sect instead, where lotus cultivars descending from the one in the pond absorb the emotions of anyone concentrating her energy before them for days. After that self-purification period, each member carries the lotus wherever she goes to absorb further emotions. Being free from wants yet not forbidding each other from personally profitable enterprises, the Mu Sect is not plagued by corruption problems monasteries and nunneries have been mired in and not wholly reliant on donations to sustain its members. Compared to traditional nuns, the girls have the liberty to work in profitable occupations to earn money for their families. Although the flowers work on males too, boys sent to the sect are few and far between due to a higher societal tolerance of negative male emotions. Moreover, there is a stronger stigma among males about being seen as emotionally weak than there is among females. Families also view girls, with their lower earning potential, as more expendable than boys, who are expected to carry on the family line.
In any event, membership in the Mu Sect is not without its own troubles. The public regards the emotionless females as cold freaks, not merely because of the unsettlingly robotic mannerisms but also because of the loving, tender qualities valued of the gender. Even those who are more gender-progressive criticize the sect: How can one make correct moral decisions without the capacity for empathy and emotional imagination? The sect responds by drilling a set of universally accepted moral tenets into new entrants and putting them through a periodically updated curriculum about the emotional lives, needs and vulnerabilities of people in the wider society. It is definitely impossible to foresee every decision-making scenario members will encounter. On the flip side, their highly principled, reasoned approach to life means they do not engage in cruel behavior on a whim. Such consistency, along with their inherent selflessness, also make them valuable assets to families and organizations employing their services.
Nevertheless, mistrust and persecution campaigns persist. It does not help that fatal misjudgments by Mu Sect members do occur, albeit with decreasing frequency, and that several advisors and financial backers from the general public turn out to be misanthropic ideologues or avaricious heavyweights who dream of a perfectly compliant, undemanding female workforce. Disentangling itself from the advisors and backers has been a fraught process threatening political fallout and messy debts for the organization. And sometimes, clear answers to the definitions of misdeeds or to questions of whether and when ends can justify means cannot be found in any universal moral code. Haters ambush members, mutilate the carried lotuses and even storm the Mu headquarters. Quickly, the sect enlists the assistance of sympathetic martial arts sects, which tend to preach ascetic lifestyles and strict discipline themselves, to train its members in fighting skills. The tension between the haters and the sect never goes away but rather reaches an equilibrium point after all these years.
It is in the midst of such violence that we meet the series' actual leads, Jun and Snowless. Jun's huge, once-esteemed family of scholars, government officials and their relatives have been condemned to slave labor in the rough countryside since his childhood days after his father was framed for collusion with a foreign enemy. He is on the run for smuggling himself out of the place in a bid to uncover the truth and seek justice for his family. Snowless is a Mu Sect fighter fending off a hate gang as she searches for a kidnapped fellow sect member in a maze of tunnels. She has adopted a pseudonym to avoid implicating her family in her work. The two of them encounter each other and work together to save the kidnappee.
On exchanging their personal stories, Snowless expresses more thanks for Jun's help. She volunteers to shelter and assist him in his investigation. The difficulties of gaining access to repositories and other official buildings as an ordinary person, let alone an ostracized sect member or a fugitive, however, complicate their task. Discovery of a man in her lodging will also scandalize her family. But dispassionate rationality leads her to a solution that absolutely stuns Jun but no well-seasoned dramaland adventurer: living as husband and wife.
Let's rewind to Snowless' teenage days for a minute. Snowless' influential family was one of those which did not see their daughters' initiation into the Mu Sect as a barrier to marriage. With their vast economic capital as bait, they secured a political marriage between her and the similarly teenage son of a social climbing merchant. This groom, however, favored a dreamy servant girl over an artificially saccharine and otherwise zombiefied wife of a more powerful background than him. The lovebirds eloped. When she spotted him in a faraway village during a mission for the sect, he was already father to a sickly little girl. Yet divorce was as unthinkable as teenage marriages were the norm in that era. Even if both families would consent, the groom's snobbish parents would sooner compel him to marry another rich wife than accept the servant girl or her unlucky daughter. So Snowless has kept the couple's whereabouts to herself. It so happens that Jun shares the groom's physical features and more than 10 years have passed by since anyone else in the two families' networks has seen the groom.
Disguising Jun as her husband, Snowless takes the chance to give the families closure over the disappearance through his adoption of the identity, foreseeing an avenue to stage an act of migration for Jun on achievement of his goal. But her moral calculation only allows her lifesaving lie to extend to this point. Their official identification as spouses must not be perjury too. And upholding the precept of the sanctity of all marriages, Snowless earnestly declares to Jun that she will care for him in every aspect as a real wife. Jun is dumbfounded.
Fulfill her role she does, staying up all night during their investigative travels, where they must forgo the company of servants, to pack his food containers with pretty, colorful snacks and mend every tiny hole on his clothes. Every time Jun reaches for any of his bundles, it has invariably been tied up by Snowless with lovely bows informed by a meticulous study of everyday aesthetics that makes up for her incapability to feel beauty or ugliness. Nestled inside each bundle is a note of reminder or a perky line from known poetry, rendered in neat, delicate calligraphy. Her insistent dutifulness simultaneously flusters and troubles him. So despite temptation from her flawless porcelain complexion and svelte figure, he resolutely draws the line at physical intimacy. Would the privileged young heiress have let her life revolve so much around him if she had not fallen ill and her parents had not given up her heart to a persecuted sect? He does not want to take advantage of a lady robbed of emotional autonomy. It is bad enough that he escapes enslavement only to inadvertently enslave someone else.
That is all the more reason for Jun to speed up his quest for justice, so that Snowless can return to her life. But setbacks and roundabouts naturally abound. Jun keeps a stoic facade, glaring and cursing at the heavens above only when he is all alone. Nonetheless, Snowless eventually spots him all bent down beside a desolate brook, clutching his head. She approaches him, and he, seeing that he cannot even keep up his tiny act in front of her, much less rescue his family, finally breaks down. She cradles his head, intently listening to his self-loathing vitriol and fears.
When Jun is done, he asks her with a resigned expression, "All right. Which bombastic poet or classic are you going to cite from your boundless memory bank this time?"
Snowless smiles, "I won't cite anything. If reason dictates that space is the best prescription for your unfurling emotional chaos right now, I'll preserve the silence you need."
Surprised, Jun looks more closely at her. Yet she is merely smiling with only her rosy lips and not her blank eyes, as always.
She continues, "Although there are numerous cases of political conspiracy, malignment, circumnavigation and name-clearing in history and the books, you are your own person, with a set of granular external circumstances and inner experience no subject of any account perfectly mirrors. On reflection, I won't stress you with comparisons to literary anecdotes anymore, even though that is the convention in my family's circle."
Gradually, Jun grows used to pouring out his woes and thoughts to her, while hiding from rain in some broken temple or deserted hut, while gazing over landscapes from cliffs and unsecured towers, and while resting on pairs of hammocks head-to-head. However weary her body is or late the hours are, Snowless never misses a word and never injects one unless he mixes up his facts, requests for her input or teeters on the edge of a breakdown. Sometimes, Jun experiences a revelation or brainwave mid-babble, and they work on how it can refine their plan.
As his feelings for her develop like reckless weed, Jun scans Snowless' countenance for a flicker of genuine emotion. But unlike his, her facade never breaks. He searches her eyes whenever the touch of her gaze or the thoughtfulness of her words warm up his body, yet those eyes are as empty as ever. When she asks about his stares, he returns her performative smile with a lonely, sad smile. Inwardly, he mocks himself for a one-sided love of an emotionally untouchable goddess who can never feel nor reciprocate his love. He is still a slave, a slave to an impossible matching game of the hearts.
Over an obligatory course of mystery hairpin bends, thriller elevated highways and horror gridlocks, Jun encounters multiple other victims of politics who see themselves as slaves of circumstances in one way or another. Regrettably, they are too immersed in their individual pains to hear each other out properly, not to mention commiserate, spot the common root of their troubles or band together to fight the system. So many people come, rant and go, whereas Snowless is perpetually nearby, perpetually ready to listen.
The campaign to bring the truth to light wraps up in resounding success. But from the shadows they are now relegated to, the vengeful political foes responsible for framing Jun's family dispatch an army of assassins after him and Snowless. At a perilous juncture, Snowless urges Jun to escape first while she stalls the assassins, reasoning that he has the potential to rise to high office by virtue of his family's illustrious legacy and thereby better the lives of many more people than she can as a member of the Mu Sect. Unable to tolerate her unflappable demeanor any more, Jun yells at her subservience. Angrily confessing his feelings, he tells her that there is no way he can function as a normal human being, much less enter officialdom, if anything untoward befalls her. What's more, if she had not undergone the lotus treatment, she would not have foolishly served as his wife, and playing dice with her life is surely a bigger decision than marrying him? She should comply with the wishes of her real self neutered by the lotus.
As expected, there is no shift in Snowless' expression even as she gives his words a great deal of thought. Her eventual reply, though, takes Jun aback, "Is my real self worth your rejection of my potential sacrifice then?"
"..."
"Let's leave it to chance," Snowless moves her lotus towards Jun. "Pry open its center, and hear for me what my real self thinks."
Jun stares at the lotus, steels his nerves and pulls apart some of the petals and stamen. A torrent of shrill voices charge at him.
"Buggy-eyed." "Feckless mimicry of a man." "Who did this pathetic slave think he was lashing out at me like I'm a toddler?" "You mean you cannot live on without living off a woman."
Stumbling backwards in utter shock, Jun looks up at the ever-calm Snowless with tears of betrayal. We see his mental reconstruction of their months of interactions, her parts replaced by images of a spiteful, haughty Snowless. Lotus bearers can lie out of necessity, but lotuses themselves do not lie.
The present Snowless plainly states, "The answer is clear. You who care about my lotus self rescind your rejection. I who have forsaken my lotus self long ago need to comply with my logical analysis. Run and live well. You'll find true love and support someday."
She swiftly heads for their adversaries, gleaming sword in hand. With a heavy heart, Jun runs in the opposite direction, away from the rosy illusions of the past episodes. Conflicted thoughts race through his mind as he races through the noisy, thick woods. Who is the real self? The one who feels, the one who contemplates, the one who wills, the one who acts, or all of them combined? Or maybe, the question should be who matters most? If it is the one who wills, though, is he in reality in love with the influential figures whose values are imparted to Mu Sect members? On the other hand, perhaps pre-lotus Snowless made a conscious choice to adopt those values when she joined the sect, knowing what their teachings are. He has never met her, but she is surely not much less intelligent than post-lotus Snowless. But what if her emotional turmoil and youth then clouded her judgment and compromised her autonomy? How much is this relevant, though? The irrational weeds in his heart have always been bending towards the rational, post-lotus Snowless, never the her in the lotus.
Amid the thicket of thoughts, a notion glows in his mind like the full moon overhead. Killing someone by conscious omission is still killing. He does not want to be one of those narrow-sighted, thin-skinned men who kill women they believe despise them when there are greater problems, of governance and society, everybody should be combating. Snowless' utilitarian logic drives him mad, yet her unfaltering concern for the bigger picture at a time when most people look out only for themselves warms his heart in contrast to those men. Prey to warmth he falls. Jun looks at a familiar bend ahead with grave determination.
The assassins pursue Snowless till the edge of the woods, where a vast plain with nowhere to hide awaits. But before their widening smirks reach their ears, a cloaked figure from among them pushes Snowless ahead, "Go! The city walls are not far!"
She recognizes Jun's eyes despite his mask and assassin clothes. Knowing now he will insist on being the one who stays behind to fend off the guys, she immediately drags him along as she sprints off onto the plain. In time, the city walls become visible. A swarm of flame arrows, however, rush towards the pair, while transforming the plain into a sea of fire.
Snowless looks at Jun, her still tranquil eyes and smile lit by the red-orange lights all around.
"If there is heaven, I'll petition for you to meet a girl of your dreams in your next lifetime."
Jun looks at her with wretched, protesting eyes which heat matches the rising temperatures around them. He wants to at least embrace her for once but who can he really embrace?
The red-orange sea rages on before silhouettes of the retreating triumphant assassins. When we next see the pair, they have fallen onto the ground. Tongues of fire creep onto their lifeless bodies. Burnt off by the flames, a petal flutters away, exposing another segment of the lotus center. To the caressing tune of a consequently unleashed stream of melodic whispers which female voice the audience instantly recognizes, pollen from the segment drifts over to form a translucent, sparkling mist draping over Jun and only afterwards Snowless herself. The fire retreats from the golden mist. The whispers dissipate.
Slowly, his chest starts to heave again, though he remains deeply unconscious. The credits roll after this close-up shot.
Physical Experience Bubble: A breathtaking network of yoga complexes and outdoor yoga locations in which thematically attired participants practice the exercise in immersive and spacious environments of transcendental aesthetic beauty that brings them leaps closer to mind-liberating alternate realities. This collaboration is fertile on multiple dimensions:
Synergy and symbiosis can generate more income opportunities for artists and storytellers who are currently precariously employed and for yoga gurus.
The breathing in, rather than mere sightseeing or browsing, of art in any form potentially sculpts artistic experiences which relatively kinesthetic elements leave culture enthusiasts and content consumers with more enduring mindset resets. Otherwise, we may speak of creations that offer food for thought, but the truth may well be that our grounded, generally sensible instincts switch us back to reality mode soon after we turn our eyes away even though breaking out of bad habits and prejudices can do everyone a world of good.
Performing yoga in fantastical settings even further removed from everyday life than studios with Zen-inspired designs is likely the strongest proposition for yoga holdouts. Some people have the perception that activities elevating mindfulness compel acceptance and hyperawareness of a wretched environment that is already causing them sensory overload, sleeplessness and general pain and frustration. It does not help them that ordinary yoga studios are often small outlets nestled right next to the detested hustle and bustle of the surroundings. They are not convinced either that soundproofing, minimalist aesthetics and meditation are sufficient to remove the acuity of location awareness. Although the ideal way of being is to be able to find peace in even the most chaotic surroundings, picking up yoga in immersive art can be a stepping stone towards greater mental capacity building.
Settings can be three-dimensional assemblages of either pure art or scenes from various types of fiction: literature, cinema, television, stage productions, etc. Behold the following examples. [Spoiler caution w.r.t. various source materials]
Monet's Spa: Participants in 19th-century gym suits, updated as necessary for yoga functionality, perform the exercise on synthetic, pavilion-sized lily pads connected by inconspicuous glass walkways atop an expansive, blooming pond as branches of towering, lush greenery sway around them. Calming floral scents, leaves' swishing sounds and trickling water, absent in typical digital art projections, can accompany yoga moves. For the safety of the participants, the pond is kept shallow while the lily pads feature the raised edges of natural lily pads. The yoga instructor is positioned on Claude Monet's Japanese footbridge. Note however that, for photos and real-life constructions alike, it is difficult to reproduce the shimmeringly lively, moving aesthetics of the Giverny pond scenery the way Monet conjured through his genius brush strokes. All the same, we should strive to approximate the mood of the art.
Parallel Piranesis: Participants in loose sportswear printed with varying quotes from Susanna Clarke's philosophical fantasy novel Piranesi are divided into two stately rooms, where they engage in yoga under the warm gazes of statues of royalty whose faces are modeled after participants in the other room and whose palms hold dioramas of places from various works of fiction (Library of Babel, The Shire, folding cities, bulk beings' tesseract, etc.). The colors of the writings and clothes are reversed on the instructor. Statue faces are based on submitted photographs, modeled using non-drying and thus reusable clay with the ideal assistance of artificial intelligence and 3D printing, and affixed to figures of corresponding gender identities and life stages. Mismatches between participant numbers and statue numbers owing to limitations (e.g. space, portability and economics) can be smoothed over with the help of backup clay faces of underappreciated customer service staff in the event of statue surplus and a participant-face lottery system in the event of statue shortfall. On exiting their rooms and meeting each other, the two groups of yoga participants find themselves in the kind of situation Clarke's eponymous protagonist enters near the end of the novel, except that their mutual consciousness put to rest his regret of not sharing the tenderness of arts with the world-weary:
People were walking up and down on the path. An old man passed me. He looked sad and tired. He had broken veins on his cheeks and a bristly white beard. As he screwed up his eyes against the falling snow, I realised I knew him. He is depicted on the northern wall of the forty-eighth western hall. He is shown as a king with a little model of a walled city in one hand while the other hand he raises in blessing. I wanted to seize hold of him and say to him: In another world you are a king, noble and good! I have seen it! But I hesitated a moment too long and he disappeared into the crowd.
Moon Binary: Participants donning flowery, touristy garments designed for yoga purposes do the exercise in an indoor space underneath, no surprise here, a pair of shining moon structures. The moons' appearances and other elements of the setting and instructor garb change across the sessions, immersing everybody in a diverse range of contemporary art and narratives where moongazers would see double in the sky: Alexander Calder's kinetic sculpture Two Moons (see-sawing crescents, wall panels covered by his influencing peer Piet Mondrian's clean grids and primary colors, instructor in red full-body suit), Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami's magic realist opus 1Q84 (a typical moon and a smaller green moon, butterfly glass house decor, instructor wearing white gloves of Japanese cab drivers and tie sewn onto white top), autistic professor Dora M. Raymaker's disability allegory sci-fi novel Hoshi And The Red City Circuit (silver and red moons, backdrop of jagged ultra-modern skyline with crimson clouds, instructor in bolero jacket and steel-toed boots like the neurodivergent heroine), Korean universe-crossing drama series W – Two Worlds Apart and one of its posters (one full moon against pastel blue sky and another against pastel pink sky, carpeted grand stair structures and backdrop of fairytale-like cathedral, instructor in manhwa-style makeup), Korean time-travel drama series Twinkling Watermelon (moon becoming two, glowing guitar decorations, instructor in 1990s Korean streetwear), German-British-American sci-fi epic film Cloud Atlas (full moon and crescent against dark purple sky, rocks and tents on sand-color carpet and backdrop of sea, instructor in its islander garb), etc. Participants will not be informed beforehand the title, genre or cultural background of the work referenced in any session, or whether it belongs to "high" culture or to "pop" culture. The point is to encourage exploration of unfamiliar works and reflect on the extent to which preconceptions and summary characterizations are valid.
Moon Supreme's Heart: In an unmistakable callback to the anti-bigotry theme in ancient fantasy drama series Cang Lan Jue (some possible interpretations and layers of meaning: parting of the orchid from the grayish greeness, parting of fairy heroine Xiaolanhua from devil hero Dongfang Qingcang) / Love Between Fairy and Devil, participants dress up as members of the fairy and devil tribes of the show before working out on a contemplative grass island atop a vast mirror-like lake. To ensure a good mix of fairy participants and devil participants, there is to be random assignment of unisize costumes. The instructor naturally dresses up as the devil lord Moon Supreme and positions herself under a sprawling tree, lit with yoga music-responsive, vein-like green string lights during winter and bursting into pink blossoms during flowering seasons. The entire setup, sans the participants, is the show's portrayal of contemplative sessions and psychological growth stages in his heart. Yoga sessions can be held outdoors if location scouting is successful and/or indoors all year round on props and reflective, water-like epoxy flooring.
Jedi Temple: Why should people from victimized societal groups always be under the loving protection and guidance of dominant groups whenever the two encounter and never the other way round? Yet those from the latter group have felt humiliated and resentful when they are at the receiving end of that reversal. Wookiees may have been an enslaved species capable of communicating only in growls and roars but they are simultaneously clever makers of flying vehicles and self-sacrificing heroes who save some Lasats from genocide in the Star Wars franchise. Following the steps of a Jedi yoga instructor in a suitable Wookiee fursuit, participants in Padawan robes cultivate inner peace through the exercise in a tranquil Jedi temple chamber. To stay in character yet overcome the language barrier, the Jedi Wookiee instructor shall have teaching assistants in the forms of Jedi from more human-like alien races like Mirialan and Theelin.
The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. (Ernest Hemingway)
There is a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in. (Leonard Cohen)
Luminescent Scars: As light pours into a cavernous space, participants in ballet tights practice their yoga poses within its ceramic-like, curved walls crisscrossed with fracture lines. Powdered gold, copper, brass, silver or platinum fill the lines. The instructor, in shimmering tights, is one of the bundles of rays that have descended to the weary and wounded. Shadows of other scar lines flit across participants' bodies from time to time in acknowledgment of feelings all around, before transforming into waves of light. The above quotes reproduced by Critical Dance from program notes of Aurum, a ballet set in motion before such patterned backdrops, have told us the art form kintsugi's ideal of embracing and growing more beautiful through broken parts. Ceramic surfaces portrayed across the sessions hail from a number of masterful or storied wares.
Sun Underfoot: The Sun feels like a villain in increasingly brutal summers over the globe. Let global warming work to our collective advantage for a change by giving us a physical practice target as we learn to mentally rise over our adversaries, be they oppressive bosses or personal paranoias. Participants styled as early Mesopotamian miners and an instructor styled as a farmer from that era work out on wide cypress planks of a platform tied with ropes of flax and enclosed like a balcony. Alternating among these workout planks are soil-coated planks from which artificial vegetables bend sideways and downwards in the direction of a glowing sun underneath the platform. The soft, golden orange hues of the orb's rays peeking through the planks accentuate spirited stretched limbs in this location pictured in Ted Chiang's short story Tower Of Babylon.
Hidden Tibetan Sea Flower Field: Among thin, translucent red synthetic plants known as Tibetan sea flowers atop a surface mimicking a frozen body of water in the middle of a quiet, snowy landscape, participants in Central Asian ethnic garb practice yoga under the directions of instructors dressed up as sci-fi action drama series Tibetan Sea Flower / Adventure Behind The Bronze Door's enigmatic, unemotional orphaned youth Zhang Qiling and his self-sacrificing mother Baima. Baima was a terminally ill young non-Han woman forcibly separated from Qiling by his father's formidable Han Chinese family. Believing he would not grow up well-adjusted in the demanding, cruel household, Baima begged lamas in a Central Asian temple (though a Sichuan temple in real life) to put her in suspended animation using the rare plants so that mother and son could reunite someday. Despite knowing she might not wake up, she pushed through with the plan to give Qiling the chance to see her alive, from which she wanted him to feel however little love that lingered on in the world. In the end, their long-awaited reunion was a literally muted affair lasting only three days, with Baima unable to hear a word or move a muscle, not even her tight-shut eyelids or lips. We are informed through the narration and the short story the sequence has been based on, however, that she knew from the follow-through of the promise his presence. Qiling held her stiff hand until she expired at long last at the end of the three days. A crushing masterpiece of storytelling that understands less can be more. Stretch out among the Tibetan sea flowers with the hope that warmth can transcend staggering time and communication barriers. What the yoga itself is less likely to do for you but is helpful to pack along wherever you adventure is a reminder that small acts of love and kindness can be worthwhile even if the other party does not seem to reciprocate.
Proto: Make way for aerial yoga. Participants perform the yoga in flowy, visually busy, ombré battle apparel, donned by the soul-transmigrating, demon-fighting couple in ancient fantasy drama series Eternal Night Star River / What Do We Mean The Official English Title Exists, in a bright, seemingly boundless white space indoors with flowing calligraphic proto-writings on the floor. The silk harnesses are similarly ombré. Hanging securely at a safe margin above the airborne participants are more of the writings. The instructor? An immobile, mossy yet modern-style stone panda embedded with a loudspeaker. It's another occasion that calls for teaching assistants, so staff dolled up as magnified versions of the show's cheering, mushroom-like white dust demons step up to the role. So what if fate were written in the stars? Anyone is free to sculpt and inspire streams of stars. The story of being summoned into a wondrous fictional universe as the secret muse of a mega-popular author trapped in his novel may sound like an office rat's self-aggrandizing fantasy, but it is true that we can motivate change on some scale through our own courage, positivity and genuine concern for someone. When the yoga / transmigration game host ("System") behind the scenes spots demoralized or half-hearted participants, she warmly reminds them through the loudspeaker that they need not be side characters in their own stories.
Dream Crew's Dream: Ramp up the airiness. Participants in satin yoga outfits which textures and shades of predominantly blue, green and purple call to mind the Inside Out films' mind workers suspend themselves in aerial yoga in an indoor space decked out with pastel balloons and covered all over with effervescent, crayon-like surfaces featuring a cotton candy-colored palette. Filming equipment (that have outlived their use on actual production sets and are stably erected) on the side remind us that this is a studio, specifically a dream-making studio in a person's mind. Before each session, the participants are polled on the famous (but uncontroversial) personality they want the instructor to emerge as, who performs so on the day itself from a towering door etched in faint white outlines. While wrangling over the shoot for another dream, they have been miraculously transported into this version of the studio in the harried personality's lucid dream, where they excitedly become his or her reassuring chaperones in a collective retreat for inner peace. Regardless of differences in vision and values, we always have a common loved one's best interests at heart.
Koiet: Are you an office drone who feels seen by the romance film Vertigo in which a graphic designer unhappy at work dreamily gazes at a rope access technician working on the facade of the skyscraper her office is located high on? But you're also wary of over-romanticizing a dangerous job exposed to the elements. Or maybe you're a rope access technician yourself and would love to design your perfect work location. Here's the middle ground. In a wide, temperature-controlled indoor space which ceiling and walls have the same color gradient shifting from teal to brown to gold as the sky in the film's last scene, participants in bright red jackets resembling the technician's attire practice yoga on upsized window suspension platforms surrounded by wool clouds. The instructor is situated before an anti-glare glass-filtered light source representing the Sun. Peeking out under the clouds are Japanese carp streamers bouncing in a choreographed wind. These carp streamers are not part of the film but anchor the setting in an impossible context to reduce the risk of people copying over the stunts to locations of actual tall height. To lower the risk further, Koiet is open only to adults.
Windows Yoga: Outdoors participants in yoga wear which stunning colors echo the red, blue and green of Bella, the parrot of the mysterious and Peter Pan-like magician Ri-eul in musical drama series Annarasumanara / The Sound Of Magic, flex their moves on horizontally lying, resilient window-like glass panes arrayed on a pavement comprising of grayish brown bricks. The idea is prancing on a wall in defiance of gravity. High schoolers in the opening musical sequence break out in dance in the same setting. The yoga instructor is decked out in the shades of the iridescent blue butterfly in the series. Here, the ridiculousness factor is a sarcastic tip of the magician's top hat to the rat race's absurdities. The series finale reveals that teenage Ri-eul was a hyper-stressed star student who developed the extreme paranoia and forlornness grownup Ri-eul has been saving youngsters from through his uplifting yet economically useless craft.
Black-Eye Exile: Put into cold storage? Not even the end of the world need spell the end of your unfurling dreamscape. Add a drizzle of good old cod liver oil. Under enchanting aurora simulations and cool hues of mood lighting and surrounded by mountain sculptures, an instructor in a panda onesie — not a more show-faithful mascot costume hindering yoga movements — leads participants with a horn-like tuft of hair each in busting out yoga movements on a snow-patterned carpeted floor. The tuft of hair is to be that way not because workplace drama series Today's A Good Day To Keep Going / Never Give Up's (add oil being the idiomatic phrase for keep going in its native language) horn-haired Bai Mashuai will ever be successfully exiled by any of his exploitative higher-ups to their panda-themed corporation's polar branch office, but because you believe that no entity, sporting dark circles or not, would have stopped the bright-eyed princeling from brushing up on some skill wherever work siestas of any variety take him.
Citadel at the End of Time: Good heavens. The end of the world is too close to home for comfort as well? Here's emotionally honest yoga at the end of time. Participants in sweaters which ruffled dark purple textures project scifi-mythology drama series Loki's stormy, all-eating being Alioth seek retreat in their meditative poses in the moody, majestic said citadel, as a nebula and branching timelines serenely curl and stretch outside its ornate windows. The instructor is styled as different Loki variants in different sessions. Anyone looking forward to an alligator instructor-Loki? While hanging around before sessions start, everybody is welcome to check out the citadel's shelves of books on time, astronomy and world cultures and philosophies. The Loki variants are so going to sneak in titles on weight loss regimens for grapes-wannabe monsters.
Belief System: How about escaping into ourselves, where some of the balms and causes for our troubles lie? Next to a glowing blue waterfall cascade, participants who are each splotched in colorful bodily paint standing for all emotions in the Inside Out films practice yoga underneath a canopy of luminescent threads that represent strands of beliefs. Around the canopy is tranquil water on which bright orbs carrying images of memories float. Before the start of each session, the participants are free to release orbs doodled with their own memories into the water. It's a hive mind harbor. Who shall the instructor dress up as? An artist donning a messily pigment-stained apron with flexible material and split-leg slits that facilitate yoga stretches. Embrace inner flaws — but not if anyone starts messing with the yoga network's staff, customers or property.
High-Dimensional Blues: Voyages hold limited value when voyagers filter their experiences through the same set of metaphysical paradigms. Give our brains an enthralling perspective workout as a reminder in this exceptionally challenging set design. Participants surrounded by blue ambulatory trees on a blue grass turf put on futuristic lightweight astronaut suits and carry out yoga in front of a wide, invisible sphere that punctuates a swath of the vegetation. Animatronics helpfully play the trees in this alien habitat from sci-fi giant Liu Cixin's horror novel Death's End, and character Guan Yifan has noted that the helmets can be removed since Planet Blue's atmosphere supports human life. So, where's the challenge? From some angles, cross-sections of plant parts in contact with the sphere's surface are visible. In later sessions, participants find themselves suddenly inside the sphere — actually a kind of warped point in space whose counterparts are encountered in war-torn Constantinople and spacecraft in the book, but which is imagined to intersect the planet at some point in its long history for our yoga quest of inner calm — and thus surrounded instead by an exposed view of all the layers and interior details of the blue vegetation, right down to water coursing along the vascular systems. We are viewing a three-dimensional landscape from the vantage point of four-dimensional space, the way hypothetical beings from two-dimensional worlds within which they can only perceive lines would gain a bird-eye view of reality upon their introduction to three-dimensional space. All space garments are swapped out for cloth designs depicting the layered structures of the original garments and the human body. These designs assume, however, that everybody is a chill yoga practitioner who has grown to ignore distracting anatomical details, so only a limited level of cluttered granularity is necessary and content such as subcutaneous facial structures and minor-unfriendly visual information can be omitted. Welcome the instructor, Sophon, a graceful yet feisty humanoid in Japanese clothing (in part or in full because the term for the fictional intelligent particles she is named after sounds similar to the Japanese name Tomoko in Chinese). Someday, though, Liu should have the privilege of peering into higher-dimensional views of his brilliant books from warped points in gender space.
The Great Before: Wish you could restart your life? You can't, but the rebirth of your mind is a close possibility. The gentle rolling knolls and plains of animation film Soul's The Great Before, hypnotic in their ethereal hues of purple and blue, may give our primeval brains cues to shed some trapping beliefs and counter-productive mental habits that we have accumulated over the decades. Participants in light bluish green yoga wear are the souls, while the instructor has sheer outer sleeves referencing the translucent soul counselors in the film. Teaching assistants from Mystics Without Borders attend to inattentive students, who must have mentally drifted off to The Great Void. Pixar is not responsible for that hitherto unknown realm.
Dove Yggdrasill: Maybe the appeal of liminality to you lies not in its proximity to any preconceived place, real or fantastical, but in its distancing from all such places. You cannot be filed away neatly into any box. You love nature but are not a nature person in practical terms. You appreciate art and narratives but value your brain muscles too much to be a mindless drone only celebrating others' creativity. Why, no existing work by anyone can quite spell out your soul's aspired refuge. This is your chance as a valued customer of the network. Submit your own setting concept to Soapbending Yoga, Inc., the neo-exercise organization presently nowhere to be found, which will match customers behind selected submissions with suitable creatives to realize the visions. Dove Yggdrasill is one potential vision, featuring an environment no scene in any medium proffers — participants in chic, snowish yoga wear perform aerial yoga on harnesses hanging on sturdy panels that double as the lowest branches of a stylized world tree. The same goes for the instructor, positioned nearest the trunk, in this most egalitarian visual format. The gnarled tree can be predominantly white, with undertones enhancing its sculptural look. Wind chimes composed of origami white doves hang securely on tree branches away from the harnesses. A vibrant monotone green background cheekily evokes the feels of a sanitized commercial shoot, because consumerism is your habitat during paid yoga sessions. The overall symbolism is connections to and remembrance of antiquity and biodiversity even in modernist seclusion. But do not overlook the finishing touch, a stretching exercise for liminality's limits that ends up interrogating liminality itself, as we shall wonder about complete independence from contemporary creative culture and put on the front of each yoga outfit an appetizing graphic of the key lime pie Loki's Time Variance Authority characters bond over during work breaks.
Among the many spanners in the works are, first, the tendency of "high" and "pop" cultures alike to carry themes and elements beyond positive ones celebrated in the yoga sessions and, second, the liberty of yoga participants to twist our intended significance of elements even within the narrow visual context presented. For one thing (or another thing, if you recall a gender portrayal concern above), does Haruki Murakami's oeuvre trivialize extramarital affairs? In the butterfly glasshouse session, will participants be walking into a dream of humble oneness with nature and embracing mono no aware, or fervently throwing themselves into an embrace of vigilante justice since those two ideals are espoused by a safe house founder who orders assassinations in 1Q84? Messaging conflicts are an area that certainly needs more work in this proposal.
At the same time, however, sessions must not be run like cults. No interpretation of any work should be treated as immune from criticism or as exclusive of all other interpretations. Staff and settings can encourage but never order participants how to feel or reflect. All individuals' dignity as autonomous cognitive beings must be recognized and respected. In any event, a hard-sell approach would likely be counterproductive, while rejection of criticism and of what-ifs increases the risk of unrigorous, insular thinking in the network's operations and arts discourse. And such discourse is ultimately of lesser importance than participants' well-being, which is the sole focus of all teaching staff. Their extensive knowledge of source materials only serves to provide imaginative context and address ethical dilemmas. Chances are you can properly reason and feel for various artistic works only after you've taken care of yourself to a certain extent.
Relevant licensing requirements apply. Where works are used in the absence of applicable licensing regimes (e.g. art sourced in-house), commission fees or salaries will be paid to creatives depending on the nature of collaboration. In all outdoors settings, care must be taken to apply for all necessary location permits, avoid environmental damage (including any repetitive trampling of plants) and minimize disruption to nearby residents and businesses too. Although the hassle as well as general expenses can be dramatically cut by substituting light projections or augmented reality for all backdrop elements, the resulting effects will not be as immersive and powerful as three-dimensional set pieces. Moreover, eye strain from augmented reality undercuts health benefits.
It is also possible to simplify the network by forsaking direct artist participation and running only pop-up yoga events in artworks' and books' real settings and filming locations like The Lord Of The Rings' Hobbiton Movie Set, the Harry Potter movie series' Alnwick Castle and East Asian historical series' Yongin Daejanggeum Park and Hengdian World Studios with authority clearance and crowd management. That has the additional benefit of leaving the difference between real-life and onscreen ambience as the only gap between participants' reality and artistic or narrative reality. Simpler still, as some may advocate, we can discard cultural elements altogether and settle on scenic venues in general. However, those alternatives not only cuts down income opportunities for creatives and narrows the diversity of works referenced, if at all, but also reduces the richness of the yoga experience and makes the arts-based immersive yoga proposed even less accessible to time-strapped, budget-constrained individuals, who cannot be expected to keep flying out for a regularly-needed restorative workout. Not everyone lives next to breathtaking scenery or some character's haunt! The preventable carbon footprint as a result of the air travel is an issue too.
To skip over harness-less financial aerial yoga, the yoga network is bound to start out small and scale up as an enduring, substantial customer base grows and kinks in operations and expenditure are ironed out. Even so, the requisite startup capital is formidable. Nevertheless, compilation of the above list has been a fruitful exercise in counting blessings. Arts, in their myriad of colors and countenances, have already multiplied the universes we touch base with in our limited lifespans. We merely lose sight of many of them all too quickly.
Congratulations on making it to the end! But don't go away yet. Root for those settings that captured your heart in the poll and comment section below.
Which settings would you sign up for if such a network existed?
