Today's Document
Xuebing Du
oozey mess
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
Love Begins
KIROKAZE
dirt enthusiast
RMH
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
Product Placement
Not today Justin
titsay
⁂
Kaledo Art
Game of Thrones Daily
d e v o n
No title available
Sweet Seals For You, Always
Misplaced Lens Cap
if i look back, i am lost
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@two-bitoutlaw
we need fewer songs about falling in love and breaking up and MORE songs about famous disasters of the sea
being told you’d cruise the seas for american gold you’d fire no guns, shed no tears, now you’re a broken man on a halifax pier might not be a universal experience, but like neither is the club. so a little perspective might be nice
@pscentral event 39: pride
"When you’re in a fight as bitter and as important as this one, against an enemy, so much bigger, so much stronger than you - well. To find out that you have a friend you never knew existed - It’s the best thing in the world."
Pride (2014) dir. Matthew Warchus
I would still use my turn signals in the Mad Max Wasteland. They'd call me "Signal" because I'd hit my blinker before ramming the enemy hot rods into the side of a desert ravine. I'd use my turn signal every time. They would respect me for this.
"That is Signal, the Last Follower of the Old Law."
My silliest pet peeve is that every set of the Narnia books are put in chronological order nowadays. When I am very passionate in my belief that LWW is what is supposed to introduce us to the world of Narnia. Not Magician's Nephew. We get introduced to the world alongside the Pevensies, and then learn it's origins later on
it's not silly at all and I fully agree. Publication order is the best way to be introduced to this series (or any series really).
You have no reason to care about any of the worldbuilding and random explanations in Magician's Newphew if you haven't already read lww. You lose all of the wonder and whimsy of a random lamppost in a wood found in a wardrobe if you know how that lamppost came to be. You also probably don't care as much about the lamppost and all of the fun worldbuilding that comes with that explanation if you haven't read lww and aren't attatched to it. It becomes a random piece of worldbuilding for you to learn instead of a resolution to wonder from a previous book.
Here is an article from NPR about it (May 22, 2026):
Carolina Milanesi, an independent technology analyst, said Google is trying to make its cash cow business — search — richer and more personalized, and it will make shopping easier. But there is a risk that users may have fewer choices about what to click. "Right now it's: I ask a question, I get a bunch of answers and I feel that I'm in control as to which answer I take, or if I'm looking for something, which product I'm going to end up buying. That is going to be less so going forward," she said. Milanesi envisions AI-enabled search and agents proposing products to consumers — perhaps even those they have requested — but with less clarity or choice around where it's coming from. "If you're going to say: 'I want a pair of Jordans, go find them,' you're not necessarily sure what steps have been taken and whether the AI has used a source or a store that was paid for and therefore came up in the search results," she said, "or if AI actually went and did their due diligence and picked the best for me as a customer."
And here's one from Time magazine (May 20, 2026):
While Google already has “AI Mode,” the company will now power the whole search bar through its new Gemini 3.5 Flash model. Instead of the classic list of blue links, Google Search will now also generate a custom page with an AI-generated summary of what you’re searching about, which will then trigger a conversation with AI Mode on the main page, allowing users to ask follow-up questions—similar to the kind of layout you would see when opening ChatGPT.
And a little more from Time's article on how this may affect the websites that we are trying to search for:
When Google first started implementing AI-assisted results, news publishers warned of “catastrophic” impacts on the industry, much of which relies on Google search to drive users to their websites. Last year, news websites saw significant traffic declines as chatbots increasingly replaced Google search as the primary way to find sites and ask questions. Small businesses also noted drops in traffic to their sites from Google, which has traditionally delivered customers. Lily Ray, vice president of SEO strategy & research at Amsive, a digital marketing agency, warned as early as last year that Google’s planned changes to search are “going to have a devastating impact on the Internet.” “It will severely cut into the main source of revenue for most publishers and it will disincentivize content creators who rely on organic search traffic, which is millions of websites, maybe more,” she told Technology Magazine.
This is you reminder that, even in Google's own Chrome, you can set the default search to DuckDuckGo.
special effects are too good now because as we left the theater after Project Hail Mary my mom was like "it's really impressive that Ryan Gosling was the only actor on screen for most of that movie" and I was confused for several seconds thinking "what about the giant crab that played Rocky?"
No but like, fr this is the power of puppetry. This is why people are regularly accidentally mic-ing Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy instead of their actors. This is why Labyrinth and Farscape and Little Shop of Horrors hold up. We all spent two and a half hours convinced that that little spider rock dude was real, because James Ortiz and his team created the sort of incredible acting chemistry with Ryan Gosling that can only happen with a real guy who actually occupies physical space
https://badsalmonella.tumblr.com/:
#something that was pointed out to me while watching a vid about the muppets was that puppeteers have the ability to improv#like even really well done animation (such as what you see in Roger Rabbit for example) doesn't have this unique ability#and that can really help sell it. the spontaneity that comes from it is very human#just thought that was neat :) never thought of it like that before
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.
Which knight of the Round Table would be your emergency contact?
Sir Gawain
Sir Kay
Sir Galahad
Sir Lancelot
Sir Bedivere
Sir Palamedes
Sir Galehaut
Sir Dinadan
Sir Mordred
Sir Ywain
King Arthur himself
I don’t know any of these guys
WHO is voting for King Arthur? Britain has spent the last 1,500 years waiting for him to respond to emergencies…
s1 is so beautifully gorgeously claustrophobic and you can feel the tension between these, like, very intimate close-up shots and tightly blocked scenes and then all the wide panouts to the open road and the car and the endless sky and it's like. okay. two brothers driving down the road together living out of motel rooms and duffel bags and sleeping in the back of their car. but then there's the the unending expanse of the interstate and a blue sky that stretches on forever. they're so wrapped up in their little world even though they're hurtling onward through the country, gas station to dive bar to pool hall. high exposure washes out half the scenes and the high contrast lightning obscures their faces half the time and everything is just so intimate and boxed in and magnetic. two boys in a motel room over and over again. my god.
I'm gonna be a theatre nerd on main here. Okay, the original recording of Christopher Plummer singing Edelweiss was released yesterday and honestly, I just want them to re-release the film with his vocals, not the dub. It feels much more natural and organic to him as a performer. What do I mean by that? Well, the man who dubbed Plummer sounded lovely, absolutely nothing wrong. But with Plummer's voice back in, I noticed subtle shifts in his acting that I hadn't before. The original dub is "Hello I am here and I am singing a pretty song, the end." Plummer's version is "I love my country, I love my family...and I think I love this woman who came into my home." And the tiny shifts in his voice match the expressions on his face and the way his eyes suddenly glint in a different way as the Captain. In conclusion, by God that man could act and he shouldn't have been dubbed in the first place. Maybe that's why he was always reticent to sing it in public.
I didn’t know this was a thing - where can I find this please?
Right here, buddy!
i don't know how to say this without being all 'kids these days' BUT kids do seem more sheltered nowadays regarding reading. all the kids' chapter books are called something like 'sir poops-a-lot and the massive fart' and people are absolutely vehement that a teenager can't read wicked because of its (nonexistent) smut and on threads right now people are seriously having a debate about whether 12 year olds can read ya books. when i was in year seven reading flowers in the attic was a rite of passage and now people are afraid of preteens knowing about the existence of sex.
hokay so i was curious as a point of contrast to the Guardian list how well tumblr would do on a best 100 SFF novels list. so i went looking for one and google directed me to NPR's top 100 novels list and i'm like aight i'll just use that one keep it simple. but as i scrolled down the list i was like wait there's been no Octavia Butler at all?? which i honestly found quite offensive but i was deep into adding books to my list challenge by that point.
also the version of the list i was looking at only had 97 entries on it; i am unsure if that's a counting error bcos some of the entries are series or if it's just missing 3 items off the NPR list but i opted to rectify both issues by adding 3 Octavia Butler books on the end.
so here is my list challenge of the 97 book long NPR top 100 list but I added Octavia Butler:
NPR top 100 books except there were only 97 on the list so I added 3 Octavia Butler's on the end. why in the world the original list had...
How many of the NPR: Top 100 Science Fiction and Fantasy Books list have you read?
0-10
11-20
21-30
31-40
41-50
51-60
61-70
71-80
81-90
91-100
where a series is listed you can count that as the first book or the whole series at your discretion.
The top 100 novels of all time published in English, as voted for by authors, critics and academics worldwide. How many have you read?
How many of the Guardian's 100 best novels of all time have you read?
0-10
11-20
21-30
31-40
41-50
51-60
61-70
71-80
81-90
91-100
Bonus: add in the tags which one is your favourite.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/ng-interactive/2026/may/12/the-100-best-novels-of-all-time <- the guardian list
^^ ease of counting!
#mood today
A truthberry might make you tell the truth... But a lieberry? A lieberry will loan you books
I was listening to this song in my car this morning and had a fucking brain blast and had to make this as soon as I got home from work.
[VD: A Project Hail Mary AMV set to "Constellations" by The Oh Hellos which focuses on Grace, Stratt, and the Hail Mary's journey. The lyrics are shown in the title font and are creatively arranged in the scenes. End VD]
