occasionally subtle
Cosmic Funnies
JBB: An Artblog!
d e v o n
cherry valley forever
trying on a metaphor
$LAYYYTER
if i look back, i am lost
titsay
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
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Kiana Khansmith
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Not today Justin
NASA
izzy's playlists!
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he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
blake kathryn
Sweet Seals For You, Always
seen from Malaysia
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@that5thace
POSTING FOR VISIBILITY, PLEASE SPREAD
IF YOU ARE IN KENTUCKY OR KNOW ANYONE IN KENTUCKY, PLEASE SHARE
adding directly from image transcriptions:
IF SEEN, POTENTIALLY OR LIKELY, CALL THE COVINGTON POLICE DEPT: 770-786-7605
REPORT ANY SIGHTINGS AND/OR FINDINGS TO THEIR CONTACT WEBSITE HERE: covingtonpolice.com/Contactus
AND/OR go directly to the Covington Police Station.
Edit: it is Covington, not Corvington
Radio Free Monday (May 18, 2026)
Welcome to Radio Free Monday for the week of May 18, 2026. RFM posts links to peoples' personal fundraisers asking for community assistance, on Tumblr, Dreamwidth, and the Fediverse.
==== Ways to give ====
Tumblr user made-in-manetheren is raising funds to pay to replace their car after an unfortunate encounter with a deer. There was no "more information" link with this submission, just the link to their Venmo.
Kaori and Rowen had their water shut off, and are raising funds to get it turned back on. Read more, share, and support the fundraiser here.
==== Recurring needs ====
Tumblr user bmwiid is raising funds to pay for their cat's vet and euthanasia costs, get their car out of impound, and cover previous outstanding costs for auto repair. Read more, reblog, and support the fundraiser here or donate to through Paypal.
Tumblr user Chingaderita is raising funds to pay for their family's healthcare. Read more, reblog, and support the fundraiser here, buy something off of her Throne list, or donate through ko-fi.
=======================
This has been Radio Free Monday. Submit items for my attention through this link (use English for your submission-text, please. If necessary, use Google Translate.)
FannishCommunity #MutualAid #CommunityAssistance #philanthropy #giving #charity
Muppet Fact #1798
Ulitsa Sezam's producer Natasha Lance Rogoff's book, Muppets in Moscow: The Unexpected Crazy True Story of Making Sesame Street in Russia, is getting adapted into a film. The script will be written by Charles Randolph and the film will be produced by Emotion Pictures and Felix Culpa.
Sources:
Lang, Brent. "‘The Big Short’ Writer Charles Randolph Adapting ‘Muppets in Moscow,’ for Emotion Pictures and Felix Culpa (EXCLUSIVE)." Variety, May 17, 2026. https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/movies/articles/big-short-writer-charles-randolph-072100848.html
Rogoff, Natasha Lance. Muppets in Moscow: The Unexpected Crazy True Story of Making Sesame Street in Russia. Rowman & Littlefield, 2022.
but whatever i don't feel strongly about amatonormativity at all .
i think it's bad that people of any age feel pressure to find a romantic partner. i think giggly "who's your crush" questions at age 9 are weird. i think young people getting into bad relationships because "it's what everyone does" is shit. i think that marriage should not be emphasised as the pinnacle of a relationship and frankly i think that marriage should not be expected at all from romantic relationships. i think that there needs to be more embracing of qprs and friendships and simply not getting a romantic partner. i think it's weird that half the time when you do something nice for someone people wonder if you're flirting. i think that people can and do care deeply about each other without needing to subscribe to the mainstream ideas of love. i think that there should be less of an emphasis on "love" in general. i think the idea of what is "romantic" versus "platonic" is different for everyone and therefore doesn't really have a use except to evoke vague ideas about social customs
Vote for progressives. #DSA #ZohranMamdani
Sorry to break it to you but you can’t bitch about MCR cash grabbing while being in possession of a ticket
All I've seen of this project is the tidbits I find on blogs, but even so, are people really looking at this ongoing War & Peace sci-fi soap opera of a tour and still thinking it's a cash-grab?!
🐟 ~ Tripod Fish ~ 🐟 (gretauwphotography)
(Credit if you use!)
Mauro C. Martinez (American, 1986) - Trust (2022)
PAINTING, SCROLL BACK UP
⚠ PAINTING ⚠ ⚠ SCROLL BACK UP ⚠
honestly the main reason i care about harm reduction is that i believe addicts are deserving of life. "what if they don't get clean?" they still deserve to live. "what if they don't contribute?" they still deserve to live. "what if they 'abuse' the system?" they still deserve to live.
addicts deserve to live by virtue of them being human. nothing will change that. nobody deserves to die of an overdose.
There was this woman poet in 4th century China called Su Hui (蘇蕙), a child genius who had reportedly mastered Chinese characters by age 3.
At 21 years old, heartbroken by her husband who left her for another woman, she decided to encode her feelings in a structure so intricate, so beautiful, so intellectually staggering that it still baffles scholars to this day.
Came to be known as the Xuanji Tu (璇璣圖) - the "Star Gauge" or "Map of the Armillary Sphere" - it's a 29 by 29 grid of 841 characters that can produce over 4,000 different poems.
Read it forward. Read it backward. Read it horizontally, vertically, diagonally. Read it spiraling outward from the center. Read it in circles around the outer edge. Each path through the grid produces a different poem - all of them coherent, all of them beautiful, all of them rhyming, all of them expressing variations on the same themes of longing, betrayal, regret, and undying love.
The outer ring of 112 characters forms a single circular poem - believed to be both the first and longest of its kind ever written. The interior grid produces 2,848 different four-line poems of seven characters each. In addition, there are hundreds of other smaller and longer poems, depending on the reading method.
At the center a single character she left implied but unwritten: 心 (xin) - "heart." Later copyists would add it explicitly, but in Su Hui's original the meaning was even more beautiful: 4,000 poems, all orbiting the space where her heart used to be.
Take for instance the outer red grid of the Star Gauge. Starting from the top right corner and reading down, you get this seven-character quatrain:
仁智懷德聖虞唐，
貞志篤終誓穹蒼，
欽所感想妄淫荒，
心憂增慕懷慘傷。
In pinyin, it is:
Rén zhì huái dé shèng yú táng,
zhēnzhì dǔ zhōng shì qióng cāng,
qīn suǒ gǎnxiǎng wàng yín huāng,
xīn yōu zēng mù huái cǎn shāng.
Notice how it rhymes? táng / cāng / huāng / shāng
The rough translation in English is: "The benevolent and wise cherish virtue, like the sage-kings Yao and Shun, With steadfast will I swear to the heavens above, What I revere and feel - how could it be wanton or dissolute? My heart's sorrow grows, longing brings only grief."
Now read it from the bottom to the top and you get this entirely different seven-character quatrain:
傷慘懷慕增憂心，
荒淫妄想感所欽，
蒼穹誓終篤志貞，
唐虞聖德懷智仁。
The pinyin:
Shāng cǎn huái mù zēng yōu xīn,
huāngyín wàngxiǎng gǎn suǒ qīn,
cāngqióng shì zhōng dǔzhì zhēn,
táng yúshèngdé huái zhì rén.
It rhymes too: xīn and qīn, zhēn and rén
And the meaning is just as beautiful and coherent: "Grief and sorrow, longing fills my worried heart, Wanton and dissolute fantasies - is that what you revere? I swear to the heavens my constancy is true, May we embody the sage-kings' virtue, wisdom, and benevolence."
That's just 2 poems out of the over 4,000 you can construct from the Xuanji Tu!
At the very center of the grid, the 8 red characters wrapped around the central heart, she "signed" her poem with a hidden message:
詩圖璇玑，始平蘇氏。 "The poem-picture of the Armillary Sphere, by Su of Shiping."
Or reversed:
蘇氏詩圖，璇玑始平。 "Su's poem-picture - the Armillary Sphere begins in peace."
Many scholars, and even emperors, throughout Chinese history have been completely obsessed by Su Hui's puzzle.
For instance, in the Ming dynasty, a scholar named Kang Wanmin (康萬民) devoted his entire life to the poems (kangshiw.com/contents/461/2…), ending up documenting twelve different reading methods - forward, backward, diagonal, radiating, corner-to-corner, spiraling - and extracting 4,206 poems. His book on the subject ("Reading Methods for the Xuanji Tu Poems", 璇璣圖詩讀法) runs to hundreds of pages.
Empress Wu Zetian herself, the legendary woman emperor of the Tang dynasty, wrote a preface to the Xuanji Tu around 692 CE (baike.baidu.com/item/%E7%BB%87…).
Incredibly, there's even far more complexity to the Xuanji Tu than just the poems:
- The name 璇玑 (Xuanji) - Armillary Sphere - is astronomical in meaning and the way the poems can be read mirrors the way celestial bodies orbit around a fixed center. It's a model of the heavens.
- Her original work, with the characters woven on silk brocade, was in five colors (red, black, blue/green, purple, and yellow) which correspond to the Five Elements (五行) - the foundational Chinese philosophical system that explains how the universe operates. So it's also a model of the entire cosmic order according to ancient Chinese philosophy.
- It's also of course deeply mathematical with this 29 x 29 perfect square grid, with sub-squares, lines and rectangles, and a structure which allows for symmetrical reading patterns in all directions
- Last but not least, the content of the poems themselves contain multiple registers. On top of expressing her personal grief and longing for her husband, it's also filled with accusations against the concubine (Zhao Yangtai) he left her for, reflections on politics (with many references to sage-kings) and philosophical reflections.
So the Star Gauge is simultaneously:
- A love letter (expressing personal longing)
- A legal brief (arguing her case against her rival)
- A cosmological model (structured like the heavens)
- A Five Element diagram (encoding the fundamental structure of the world according to ancient Chinese philosophy)
- A mathematical construction with perfect symmetry and precision
And yet, for all this complexity, we should not forget this was all ultimately in service of the simplest human message imaginable: a 21-year-old woman asking the love of her life "come back to me".
Her husband did, eventually. According to what empress Wu Zetian herself wrote in her preface to the Xuanji Tu, when he received Su's brocade he was so "moved by its supreme beauty" that he sent away his concubine and returned to his wife. As the story goes, they lived together until old age.
The heart at the center was filled after all.
WiP - Doll Glasses
This is a little compilation as I didn't take photos of all the progress but ended up using them still. I have to adjust the glasses for one doll a bit more, it's a too fine work to get them right. But here we go.
I didn't make a real pattern here I just drew some circles on a piece of cardboard and basically traced them onto the foil, flipping the circles to have them even.
The top glasses were the ones I tried first the day prior they are a bit too uneven.
And the little oval circle are for Alastor's new glasses that finally came out in a way they suit him.
This pair here is for Apocryphos as the sunglasses I got him are way WAY too huge on his head.
They look nice from the sides.
But I am not 100% satisfied with the lines around the glasses, I will adjust them.
Alastor's new glasses, I have shown them before and these are still the photos with the non cured spot :') but i wanted to show them compared to his other pair.
Sometimes it's just a few lines, now I am happy with his glasses <3
Fun facts about immigration in the US you might want to share with friends and relatives for no particular reason
The United States actually had open borders until 1924
The Immigration Act of 1924 had an overall negative impact on the economy and foreign relations with Asia, but Hitler praised it.
ICE didn't exist until 2003
Illegal immigration is not actually classified as a crime. If it was, cases would be handled by the judicial branch, and defendants would receive the benefits of due process. But because it isn't, it is handled by the executive branch, and defendants do not get due process. That means no lawyers, no jury, and no real judge.
Immigration "court" processes about 30 people at a time, including children, and the "judges," who are not required to have any experience or education in law, face no consequences for wrongful deportation, they are only evaluated based on how many people they process.
Before 2025 there were an estimated 20,000 wrongful deportations, with many confirmed and several reported on in mainstream media. That number skyrocketed in 2025.
There were more deaths in ICE concentration camps in 2025 than any year prior. If nothing is done about it, that number will increase in 2026.
Sources
The US had open borders before 1924. (which is not to say everyone was permitted, they excluded people based on race and disability, but 1924 is when the US was first considered to have closed borders)
Negative economic impact from the 1924 Immigration Act (fewer patents) (economic harm to US-born workers)
Department of Homeland Security, formed in 2002, created ICE in 2003
Hitler praised it, because it was openly just eugenics.
Wrongful deportations (sources within sources)
2025 deaths in ICE custody
some of you have GOT to get comfortable with lying and situational morality and i'm not kidding
