Going through the looking glass

and back again 34 years old, she/they, I mostly blog and ramble about the deeper implications of stuff that interests me.

[spiegelgestalt]

One piece of world building Noone in the svsss engages with is the existence of the immortal alliance conference under the assumption that demons are also people. Because if you consider demons people it becomes a greatest game/running man/squid game situation really fast.

[josephbrassey]

“Haha remember when murder-hornets were gonna be a thing? What a nothingburger.”

Yes, because the Washington state government activated like a sleeper-cell and ruthlessly, systematically hunted them down and annihilated them.

“Y2K came to nothing amirite?”

Yes because an army of software engineers working around the clock, losing sleep, and busting ass till the last minute prevented it from happening.

“Remember the hole in the ozone layer?”

You mean the one that was fixed through rigorous world wide government action?

One of the root problems of our society is a refusal or inability by media to articulate that all those “it’s gonna be an apocalypse” disasters were not disasters because we collectively did something about them.

The good news is this is actually quite correctable. I maintain my firm belief that we as humans are capable of solving almost all of our problems, when we decide to do so.

And I still think that’s going to happen. I don’t know when or how, but I do know that abandoning hope won’t help bring it about.

And I refuse to let the cynics own a chunk of my heart.

[astraltrickster]

Personally, I'd even say our ability to just point out the phenomenon is a solid start.

[spiegelgestalt]

You know everyone in hiphop media is complaining about the lack of substance in hip hop/ drake destroying the culture. But you know its on you too. YOU are talking about drake and a beef that ended two years ago when you could talk about Vince staples absolutely stellar album instead.

[bethanydelleman]

I have been listening to this podcast called Betwixt the Sheets, The History of Sex, Scandal & Society, and it's really reminding me of the main reason that you should listen to experts. It's not because of the reason media usually shows, them having encyclopedic knowledge of their subject (though many do have that) it's their ability to sort.

This podcast demonstrates that ability really well because sex scandals tend to be used as propaganda, so it's difficult to tell if they are true or not. The host will ask the historian guest, "Did he have sex with men?" and the guest will say something like, "Well four sources say so, but three were written after his death and the one from his lifetime was from a dude who REALLY hated him, so I'm going to conclude no."

That is what an expert can do, that we've perhaps forgotten about because we have so much information at our fingertips, an expert can tell which information is good & valid vs. bad & unreliable. An expert can sort much faster than a layman because they've been doing it for years.

It's the same for my field. Some things I am absolutely sure are wrong, like if someone says "We only use 10% of our brains." No, we use all of it and I can even tell you what every part does. But other claims, if I see a news article claiming something that sounds fishy, I can read the research article behind it and judge the validity of the source. I can sort. I know which parameters to sort on. That was the entire point of my education and it was pounded into my head.

Knowledge isn't enough. Researching isn't enough because if you don't know how to sort you'll just be led astray down dangerous rabbit holes. That is why experts are so important.

[quasi-normalcy]

I think that Elon Musk is an object lesson in moral philosophy.

Like, he's the epitome of self-interest; the closest thing real life can produce to a Randian hero. And by any reasonable standard, he's won at life! He's the richest man ever to live, and he's getting richer; he controls the channels of information and communication; the government of what remains the world's only superpower waits on his command. If capitalism had a victory condition, he would surely have achieved it. And yet...

He's empty. He's an absolute sucking void of neediness. His own children hate his guts. He pays professional gamers to run up impossibly high scores in every game under the sun because the pale glow of being praised by epic bacon chuds online is the closest thing that he can feel to love.

Like. I can't tell you what a soul is, but I think you neglect it at your peril.

[madonnamadeofasphalt]

You'd think people who follow a religion where one of the main tenets of faith is that literally the most righteous and perfect man possible got sentenced to execution by imperial occupation forces and died horribly after many hours of torture would be immune to the "good things happen to good people, if you're unhappy it's probably your own fault" kinda thinking, and yet

[spiegelgestalt]

The philosophical idea that nothing is real and everything just happens in your mind is the kind of idea that is hard to disprove in discourse but which shatters immediately at contact with reality. Even the people saying it don't really believe it. Or they wouldn't look left and right when they cross a busy street. They would just take control over the matrix and believe and dream every arriving car wouldn't exist.

This is just the chosen one narrative with extra steps. It gives you an excuse to have main character syndrome and dresses it up in deep philosophical thought.

Doesn't make it true though.

[prophecydungeon]

that’s not………. how child speech works…………………………………………..

[prophecydungeon]

god okay in an attempt to be less of an asshole, here’s how child speech DOES work (or tend to work, at least)

kids tend to hypercorrect — this means that they tend to say things like “sleeped” instead of “slept,” “writed” instead of “wrote,” “goed” instead of “went,” etc

kids tend not to make errors such as omitting verbs (“i hungry”)

kids also tend not to make errors in the i/me, she/her department (“me am hungry”)

simplification of difficult sounds — consonant clusters especially, so things like st, sp, ps, etc., as well as f, v, th-sounds, ch-sounds, etc.

“babbling”-type utterances (“apwen” for “airplane,” using one babbly word for multiple objects, things like that) generally occur in children under the age of three and a half

say it with me: an eight-year-old child is not going to be saying “me hungwy”

do not confuse child speech with stereotypical learner english mistakes, that’s not only incorrect but also gross on the stereotypical learner english front (“me love you long time,” anybody?)

if you’re going to write kidfic please do some goddamn research

[prokopetz]

Totally. It can be helpful to remind yourself that young children tend to speak as though the English language actually made sense. Our brains are pattern-recognising machines: children are really, really good at puzzling out the implicit rules of the English language, but they don’t necessarily know all the silly exceptions and bizarre edge cases that break those rules yet - those can only be learned through experience and rote memorisation.

Basically, when children who speak English as a first language make mistakes, it typically reflects a tendency to treat English as more grammatically, syntactically, and/or orthographically consistent than it really is. In some cases, this can be compounded by the fact that some kids will get offended at how little sense “proper” English makes, and insist upon using the more consistent forms even though they know very well that they’re technically “wrong”.

[idiagroena-deactivated20160720]

for a long young portion of my life I insisted on pronouncing Sean “SEEN” because that’s how it’s spelled.

[pftones3482]

As someone who spends a good majority of her time working with kids, it irks me to no end when I see children written as if they’re babies.

Past the age of about five or six years old, children can have deep, intellectual conversations about the most bizarre of things. I HAD A CONVERSATION LAST WEEK WITH FOUR THIRD GRADERS ABOUT THE GAS PRICES AND TAXES IN HAWAII.

Were they entirely correct in the facts they were giving? No, because it was all from what they had heard from parents or on the news. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that I was having a genuine conversation with four eight and nine year olds about taxes.

Just about the only speech problems most kids have, unless they have a speech impediment, is not being able to pronounce certain consonants (replacing ‘th’ with ‘fw,’ for example, and some letters are harder to form with your mouth than others) and doing exactly what the person above said: using the English language the way they know how, which isn’t always the way English works.

Kids aren’t stupid. Stop writing them like they are.

[spiegelgestalt]

Still on my scum villain reread and I want to share three observations:

A) I'm pretty sure that satisfaction points are linked to current Luo binghe while badass points are linked to future Luo binghe/or maybe sqq - because the system only mentions that Luo binghe has to fight after sqq shows what a badass he is

B) the abuse of lbh was real but I'm pretty sure his fight during the invasion arc was a vote of confidence from sj more than anything else (they were one fight down and sy underestimates how much sj cares about the reputation of the sect) (and sn I wouldnt have expected that the novel actually lampshades the fact that a passive protagonist needs someone else to drive the story)

C) I wish more Fandom content would grapple with the fact that shen yuan is basically an incel nice guy. only that he's gay and that's why he doesn't lust after women. But he's the kind of person who sees women as lesser once they had sex 100%. He's not a nice guy. He's a clever opportunist who happens to be in love with lbh

Edit to change two observations to three... I really like this novel and can't stop talking about it 😅

[spiegelgestalt]

Finally got time to listen to the best of iceman ( aka people agreed it's Janice stfu) and this is clearly a kendrick lamar diss (the buried alive stuff, the drop the same night as me stuff etc) combined with Drake begging that an unnamed someone calls him and begs him for forgiveness and than maybe sleeps with him

And once again I have to ask - are you the other woman Drake? Did kendrick sleep with you and than went back to his wife and you have been salty ever since? Because at this point it's either that something deeply hip hop cultural is completely going over my head or it's that

I don't even know. I also don't know why everyone is so hyped for that one

[squareallworthy]

Everyone will not just

If your solution to some problem relies on “If everyone would just…” then you do not have a solution. Everyone is not going to just. At not time in the history of the universe has everyone just, and they’re not going to start now.

[spiegelgestalt]

Even you will not just..

[annabelle--cane]

this website as a whole is a loooot more into assigning health and moral weight to random stuff based on spiritual value judgements than it realizes, and it also super links health with ethics and goodness of personal character. not reading the right kinds of books / not socializing enough / not having sex / not doing well in school / not working = this is unhealthy = this "rots" your brain and soul = you are a bad person and I'm allowed to insult you into changing your behavior for the general good. this isn't a thought process that's unique to tumblr dot edu at all, but I think the unique tumblr flavor of it comes from an intense feeling of aggressive insecurity; this is the nerdy subcultures website and most of us here have experienced isolation from our meatspace communities in some form so it feels really emotionally rewarding for a person to be able to say See, Compared To This Loser I Actually Have A Very Robust And Normal Social Life.

[hexennyan]

i remember reading svsss for the first time and loving bingqiu and then i discovered the possibility of bingjiu and my life hasn't been the same since

[spiegelgestalt]

something that makes me uncomfortable about re:zero is how much loli stuff is in there. i guess it usually has some kind of point but man i wish there was less of it. i find the loli stuff harder to stomach than the gore

[lambiesvault]

Do you think a disillusioned Ning Yingying ever ran away from Luo Bingge only to realize how utterly and truly alone she was after Bingge took away her dad and her friends and her home.

So when Bingge casually walks into the temple she's been camping at, she stamps out the little resentful voice telling her to spit in his face and slaps him instead. He doesn't even look surprised. She slaps him again. She thinks to tell him that their Shizun was right about him. She watches him pull out a bouquet of moon-kissed-pink-pups from his sleeves with an unreadable expression. She keeps silent. He's all she has left, and this one boundary must be maintained if she's to keep him.

She plucks a few moon-pups from from her bouquet and places them on the altar, saying a silent prayer for herself and her late Shizun. Then she lets her lord husband take her away once again.

[spiegelgestalt]

that is such a vibrant image. makes me want to write fic about that

NYY is apparently the source of a lot of drama in PIDW - we know that book has a very skewed perspective - so what if she's such a source of drama because she costantly tries to kill LBG/ bring him down/tries to escape but his protagonist halo always stops her plans

also i kinda want them to grieve together about shen jiu (in a eliza hamilton/aaron Burr kind of way) - its never spoken about - it mustn't be ever spoken about - but its still there

[simplyophelia]

Shen Jiu’s Fics Recommendation! #2

I’m very happy to see you guys liking my first recommendation list, I’m a very shy person most times but I would love to try and interact with you guys more on what you think! :D

I hope you guys will also like these one, honestly I wish there are more fics about Shen Jiu character and his thoughts rather than just straight smut (not that they’re not good! I just like devastating angst and comfort fics hehe)

Based from the poll, you guys seem to prefer Shen jiu centric fics! Second and third being Shen jiu pairings with Yue Qingyuan and Liu Qingge. I will try to find top tier fics of these! Its hard to find the one with good qualities and interesting one.

I apologise that this list took a long time, collage classes and assignments took up most of my time ;~;

1. The Saviour Of Qing Jing Peak, by worstloki. (Oneshot)

Shen qingqiu during his disciple days! Nothing changes except the fact the Qing Jing disciples all love him, hehe. A very good fic.

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

2. Victims Of the Night, by Godotfound. (Oneshot)

Newly named Qing Jing Peak successor Shen Qingqiu drinks something he thinks is plain juice at a party. It was not in fact juice. But what does it matter when he’s having the best night of his life? Especially when he can make it all of his martial siblings’ problem.

I really love this fic! Its full of funny drunk Shen jiu lol.

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

3. The Wedding Under The Moonlight, by randomfanbibul. (5 chapters, complete!)

So, the Cang Qiong Mountain peak Lords get drunk. chaos ensues.

A.k.a, Shen-shixiong got drunk and decided to he’ll drag his martial siblings to also get drunk and witness his wedding to the moon princess!

https://archiveofourown.org/works/68042231

4. Dog Days Are Over, by Emily_Elizabeth_Fowl. (Incomplete, 3 chapters.)

binghe has the misfortune of getting turned into a dog. but is it truly so unfortunate?

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

6. When a Research Opportunity Fell Into Your Lap, You Take It! (Oneshot)

What was Mu Qingfang supposed to say? That Xiao Jiu's dual-cultivation system intrigued him, and he'd like to examine it closely? And, even putting that aside, attempting to soothe those meridians into a properly functioning system would be the challenge of a millenium?

It's not like he had any better explanation to give, so that's exactly what he said.

Xiao Jiu blinked. “...What."

A.k.a ; mu Qingfang marries Shen jiu… for science!

https://archiveofourown.org/works/75729241

5. Even Hell could be made into a home, by Emily_Elizabeth_Fowl (oneshot)

Binghe and Shen Jiu switch body, Shen Jiu decide to make the Abyss his home.

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

6. In The Name Of Cang Qiong (verbal warfare), by jayellezee. (oneshot)

Huan Hua has been hounding Cang Qiong for their sect secrets. Clearly that's a job for their sect strategist.

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

7. I’ll Drag You Back Myself, by Emily_Elizabeth_Fowl (oneshot)

(Qijiu!) Tianlang-jun possesed Yue Qingyuan body, Shen Qingqiu is NOT pleased >:(

https://archiveofourown.org/works/77976846

8. As The Wheel Shatters, by Annoynamous_Account (9 chapters, completed)

Shen Jiu was cursed. No that wasn’t it. He felt cursed. Two lifetimes he’s lived with memories and even when he tries, nothing happens. So there; cursed. He wakes up again and in the end why bother? What was the saying; three times the charm.

Shen Jiu decide to fuck it and leave his title behind! Oh yeah, and Tianlang-jun tag along.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/33282235

9. Happy System, by worstloki. (Incomplete, 26 chapters.)

Yet another amazing fic by them! This one is a MUST read one! I love to know more about Shen QingQiu relationship with others peak lords.

Eleven newly titled peak lords find themselves strapped with a system. It's only discernible motive? To make Shen Qingqiu happy.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/61458523

10. Regretting You, by hasa3810. (Incomplete, 6 chapters)

Having lived a miserable life, Shen Qingqiu decides that if he ever gets a second chance, he'll toss Shen Qingqiu away and stay as Shen Jiu.

Now having been reborn into the past, Shen Jiu is going to live a life without any connection to his past.

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

11. Plum Blossom, by hasa3810. (Oneshot)

Gongyi Xiao and Shen Qingqiu accidentally spreading dog food at some pointer exchange event between Cang Qiong Mountain and Huan Hua Palace (and more).

A very cute rare pair ship!

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

12. The Love Letter, by shorimochi (oneshot)

"Were you the one who sent the letter?"

Gongyi Xiao wasn't sure how to react, when presented with a letter he had never seen, in front of a person he had only ever admired from afar. It was probably a prank, but who dared to fake a love letter for the Qing Jing Peak Lord? Yet, meeting Shen Qingqiu's eyes, he found himself doing something he never thought he would.

"I've always admired you, Peak Lord Shen."

This ship is taking over me hehe!

https://archiveofourown.org/works/31157651

13. When you just want to spend your time with your shidi while tiny but your martial siblings says NO!, by ThatMysticKnight. (Oneshot)

(Qijiu!) Yue Qingyuan gets hit by a curse that temporarily shrinks him to just a few inches tall. Someone has to take care of him until the curse wears off, and everyone is surprised, and wary, about the fact that Shen Qingqiu is arguing that the responsibility should be his.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/82310076

14. Blink and You’ll Miss It, by youleeyah. (Completed, 25 chapters!)

(Liujiu!) Liu Qingge slowly gets to see Shen Qingqiu in a completely new light after a mission mishap when the Qing Jing Peak Lord transforms into a much younger version of himself.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/60153037

15. How We Used To Be, by Emily_Elizabeth_Fowl.

(Qijiu!) Qi-ge's brows furrowed slightly. "Xiao Jiu?"

"Always fretting so much," Shen Jiu scoffed, but couldn't keep the fondness out of his voice. He brought up his free hand to pat Qi-ge's head, like one would a dog. A very loyal, protective, beloved dog. "This one is fine, Qi-ge needn't worry."

Judging by the way Qi-ge's eyes nearly popped out of his sockets, that probably wasn't how he usually acted in public. So what; He suffered some pain, he deserved some Qi-ge cuddles!

"Shen-shidi," the healer called gently, still circulating the qi through Shen Jiu's wrist. "Do you recognize who I am?"

"Of course I recognize shixiong," Shen Jiu lied confidently.

Aka : Shen Jiu Amnesiac!

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

16. Fraudulent marriage for the shattered, by CherriEt. (Completed, 25 chapters!)

(Liujiu!) In another timeline, before Luo Binghe arrives to Qing Jing Peak, Shen Qingqiu meets Qiu Haitang. They have a chance to talk, and after some discussion, they decide to continue where they left off. The Cang Qiong Mountain Sect has to adjust to Shen Qingqiu's new fiancée, who they find even more intolerable than Shen Qingqiu.

As the two 'love birds' throw themselves into a whirlwind of unstable romance, the peak lords are forced to learn about and understand everyone's least favourite sect sibling.

Meanwhile, Liu Qingge is confused, somewhat jealous and annoyed, as he somehow became Shen Qingqiu's bitter ex-wife and sticky mistress in the narrative.

(I have not read this one, but the premise seems good!)

https://archiveofourown.org/works/56050213

17. And I Don’t Know, Just How Much More I Can Go Through, by eolian234. (Oneshot)

(Technically Qijiu?) Luo Binghe is mistaken for his Shizun's Qi-ge.

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

18. Sect Leader Capyqi, by Otno (oneshot.)

(Qijiu)Yue Qingyuan was turned into a capybara but that won't stop him from doing his peak lord duties.

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

19. The Voice In My Head Is a Bad Writer, By Karot (8 chapters, completed!)

(Liujiu) Thanks to a typo in Shang Qinghua's outline, Shen Jiu ends up enslaved to the wrong family—the righteous, loving Liu clan, instead of the cruel Qiu family.

Now Liu Minghan (future Liu Qingge) is trying not to fall in love with the boy he was cursed to bully, the narrative is collapsing, Shang Qinghua is repenting to the gods, and Shen Jiu has started flirting back—with barely-veiled threats.

All Liu Minghan wants to say is, “Hi. You’re incredible. I like your fan.” But the voice in his head keeps making him say things like, “Poison suits you. It hides your lack of talent.”

https://archiveofourown.org/works/67104403

[spiegelgestalt]

You have heard tianlang jun/shen jiu but have you considered su xiyan/shen jiu. Come on. It would be so funny. Shen jiu could be Binghes step dad. Let's strengthen those daddy issues 😊