titsay
Today's Document
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Stranger Things
NASA
Monterey Bay Aquarium
izzy's playlists!
Discoholic 🪩
$LAYYYTER
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cherry valley forever
Keni
Show & Tell
occasionally subtle
Acquired Stardust
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
Andulka
Peter Solarz
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"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
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@wandering-worldbuilder
Not sure if this one's been done yet, but after doing a bit of digging, I found an original, full-size version of Angus Mcbride's art of Saruman and his orb, aka "Pondering My Orb" meme. (Yes, this is actually Saruman.) Unfortunately, I could not find the original title, if there ever was one.
After comparing a couple others, this was the best version I could find in high quality.
Now you, too, can ponder Saruman's orb in full, high-quality wizardry.
Enjoy!
art by Curtis Lanaghan
Important notes from today's lab meeting
It's one of many reasons that workers tell Polygon they are eager to unionize.
Employees and developers working on Magic: The Gathering Arena say they were hired with promises of remote flexibility, so they bought homes and built lives around those assurances. But they say they are now being told they may need to relocate to Washington state — or effectively lose their jobs.
Those concerns are a major reason why a supermajority of workers on the Arena team are attempting to unionize with the Communications Workers of America, under the banner United Wizards of the Coast. The group publicly launched its campaign on April 27, calling on Wizards of the Coast and parent company Hasbro to voluntarily recognize the union by May 1.
These employees are doing important and laudable work in response to being forced into a bad situation but I’m glad they still took the opportunity to call themselves “United Wizards”
WotC has still refused to recognize the union and has escalated to sending organizers letters directly to their homes about how unionizing is a bad idea. Luckily, our United Wizards are educated, organized, and agitated and the form letter from Hasbro was as laughable as it was threatening.
If you want to help out the United Wizards you can sign this petition
cwa.org/uwotcletter
Solidarity baby!
bugs!
i'm still deeply into making fake porcelain things -> here's a little fox. also featuring hollow filigree joints which i have wanted to make for a long time but haven't had the right project or motivation for.
more ms paint dragons (available on my kofi as adoptables!)
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.
by Art of Neight
this list of adjectives actually rocks
AAAAA PHEW i just finished binding a bunch of new zines that compile my PNW fantasy sketch pages :”) just in time for when I get to table at the Portland Zine Symposium tomorrow!!!!! if anyone’s in the area come say hi!!!
I’ve loved walking through this event for several years now, I’m so happy that i get the chance to table this time 🥹🥹🥹
Thanks for the interest folks ;_; I went ahead and added it to my ko-fi shop for those who want one but can't make it to Portland!
(Since I'm tabling this weekend and next, I might be a little slow sending them out, but i'll do my best to do it asap, definitely within 2 weeks! Thank you ;v; )
So this zine managed to sell out twice, and your guys' support on it kinda actually changed my life. ( <- I've been anxious to say it that bluntly,.. but it's true.) Thank you, seriously ;_;
For this reprint, I made a new cover (since the old one was just a repeat of one of the inner illustrations), and also added one more ecoregion: The High Desert :D So now it has:
The Coast Range
The Valley
The Cascades
The High Desert
I'm definitely going to expand on this idea into a bigger project as soon as I have a bit more time-- like an actual book :") But this will be the final version of the zine! Thanks so much again yall.
Tbh a lot more sold than I thought, and I have a con coming up and will need to keep my workload from getting too much LOL ;_;
I'll leave orders open 1 more day (May 24) then will keep them closed til con stuff slows down (around June-July)
THANK YOU SO MUCH for your guys' support ;_____;
1655
A Bug! With a Knife!! 🗡
Sketch commission for SciDragon on FA! :D
do you like fi sh¿
Small collection of color sketches of speculative art of dinosaurs
Some color sketches I made as a personal creature design challenge, I've been having fun making these unnacurate and featherly representations of dinos on my spare time. My goal was to make em as visually striking as a could without losing the base design in the process. From top to bottom they are: Carnotaurus, Qutzacoatlus, Spinosaurus Mirabilis, Yi Qi, Dilophosaurus and Ankylosaurus
SWAN 🦢 ✈️ (Strategic Wyvern Aerial Navigator)
"The “SWANS” are biomechanical lifeforms that after years of mimicry adapted to resemble combat jets. Their wolfram-like skin not only is resistant to the toxic and parasitic dangers of the ‘false ocean’ but is nigh impossible to penetrate. While not a real bird they present many similar features and behavior. It's not all too rare to spot them flying in flocks and engaging in courtship
Swans are known to jam signals and strike airborne carriers since they’re an extremely territorial and violent species. First it will race against the enemy (it should be noted their structure allows them to reach enough speed to break the sound barrier) as a sign that they dominate the air space before they plunge the foe into the ground. Competitiveness amongst the species in a similar fashion has been observed to uncertain ends. In spite of all the gathered studies their intelligence and physical feats are still under research but paired with their enormous size and aggressivity is more than a difficult task.
They are rapacious hunters from the skies and encounters are advised against. There’s no current methods to defend against the Swans and in consequence it has obstructed facilities, aviation and transportation."
