So many worlds to explore....

With some book and TV quotes that I thought were very appropriate for what my eyes were and still are currently processing.

This sounds very red string of fate. Y’know the Chinese concept about soulmates who are destined to meet where the thread may knot or tangle but it will never break. Did NPSS really just drop 5k about how Heihua are soulmates actually. Is that what I’m reading.

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME. So Xie Yuchen and Hei Xiazi are a rare example of meeting the right person at exactly the right time???

“She used to say she was the kite and I was the line... without me she'd become untethered and she would float away... And then without her, I would just, you know, crash, just drop right down to the ground.” - Hugh Craine about his wife Olivia Craine in The Haunting of Hill House TV Series.

THIS IS A CANON ROMANCE AS FAR AS IM CONCERNED. The whole trying to push Xie Yuchen away to keep him safe… hhhhhhhh

LOVE CHANGES YOU FOR THE BETTER???

“What’s a soulmate?”

“It's uh... Well, it's like a best friend, but more. It's the one person in the world that knows you better than anyone else... It's someone who makes you a better person. Actually, they don't make you a better person, you do that yourself - because they inspire you. It's someone who you can carry with you forever. It's the one person who knew you and accepted you and believed in you before anyone else did... And no matter what happens, you will always love them. Nothing can ever change that." - Dawson’s Creek

Hey did NPSS just say that Xie Yuchen and Hei Xiazi matter more to each other than their own lives? I mean Mystery of the Abyss was basically that but I’m still staring at that bit about the other person mattering more than oneself and bluescreening.

THIS IS MY CHOICE ASS LINE???

"Mine is the choice of Lúthien, and as she so have I chosen, both the sweet and the bitter." - Arwen about choosing her lover Aragorn over an immortal life, The Lord of the Rings.

“Remember. This is my choice, not yours. You dont have to bear any blame or guilt.” - Ying Long to Bingyi in Fangs of Fortune

Also, I better get that story next because hey what do you mean Xie Yuchen went with Hei Xiazi on a suicidal revenge mission that Hei Xiazi desperately tried to keep him out of but Xie Yuchen was like, “no I’m coming with you and if I die it doesn’t matter because I’m with you”. Where’s that story? Like please for the love of all things say that either a book or a new movie is coming out with that story in it.

Oh and now they’re stars. Amazing. I’m having a fever dream. NPSS basically spelling out that Heihua are doomed without one another and need the other to survive or they’ll collapse. And when you relate that to the bit earlier about Hei Xiazi trying to push Xie Yuchen away to keep him safe… and how Hei Xiazi doesn’t think fate can be defied but Xie Yuchen does and when you put that into the context of Mystery of the Abyss??

"Their spirit names are Tui and La. Push and Pull. And that has been the nature of their relationship for all time… Tui and La, your moon and ocean, have always circled each other in an eternal dance. They balance each other. Push and Pull. Life and Death. Good and Evil. Yin and Yang." - ATLA

This binary star imagery is giving the Yin and Yang comparison of Tui and La and how they perfectly balance one another. And especially in Ultimate Note with how Heihua’s relationship seems to show how they get so drawn into each other until Hei Xiazi actually consciously tries to push Xie Yuchen away but then keeps getting pulled right back in.

Yes I’m very normal about all of this and I’m processing it amazingly what are you talking about.

NPSS WHAT THE FUCK. HE JUST WOKE UP AND SAID “HEIHUA RIGHTS”.

And don’t even get me started about the porcelain shard reveal and what that says about their relationship. The fact that Hei Xiazi unknowingly gave Xie Yuchen the piece he needed to succeed in the eyes of the Xie Family and become their head and he feels guilt over that moment because of what it put Xie Yuchen through but it probably saved his life???

My personal headcanon is now that neither Xie Yuchen nor Hei Xiazi actually realised that about each other when they met again until maybe Xie Yuchen opened up about the porcelain shard as a story from when he was younger and Hei Xiazi realised the significance of that one random moment.

And we get the reveal that although Hei Xiazi did eventually lose his eyesight he’s still alive with Xie Yuchen when the deer comes. And that may be an ambiguous ending for the two of them but given the whole theme of the story is that they are able to save one another over and over again - which has been the nature of their relationship for all time - I like to think that means they made it out alive and continue to be together.

But I’m still here sitting in shock. Im gonna be here in shock for a while longer.

Oh and don’t worry I’ll get to the Louvre Museum Date one as well. Because again - WHAT.

Anyway here’s the link for this one so you can all experience the absolute state of shock I went through first hand : https://merebear474765851.wordpress.com/2026/07/28/moving-forward-through-the-flowery-night/comment-page-1/?unapproved=19950&moderation-hash=5d2b73cac31f6dbdfd2f4621fb56f274#respond

You might know him from a thread where he was getting wowed by free appetisers in a Mexican restaurant.

Firstly: He is doing a bit pretending to be a wandering samurai. It's a joke and his posts are all made up. This is very obvious if you actually look at his account and website:

He does purport to be Japanese but based on some of the other content he posts there's reason to believe he's British.

Which brings me to my second point: his Samurai content is interspersed with posts like this:

And this:

Yeah this is also the guy from the truck thread going around. That's what prompted this post and in retrospect I should have said so explicitly.

He claims he just uses AI to translate his posts from Japanese. He also says the art on his website isn't AI generated. I think he is full of shit on both counts.

I only gave a couple of examples but even on a brief look through his twitter it was apparent that he posts a LOT about UK politics to the point where he's quite patently British. He is a Restore supporter which is a party that split away from mainstream far right party Reform due to feeling they weren't right wing enough.

It might not surprise you to hear he does not seem to know shit about Japan? Both the salsa story and the truck story failed the smell test for people who are familiar with Japan. There's also a story about going to a potluck where he seemingly couldn't come up with a single Japanese dish for the character to cook??

Episode 5 hurts because in RL no one came to the rescue. That poor woman did in fact hang herself in her classroom in RL and the case of how parents bullied her to death came to light afterwards (with very little to no consequence...some outrage that was pretty much it).

All in all ,"Teach you a Lesson" is a very satisfying watch though.

...sound on

She got the idea for the study while walking with her advisor at Stanford to discuss her thesis topic, and the paper she eventually published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2014 is sharp enough that it should have ended the seated meeting on the day it came out.

She ran 4 experiments on 176 people. Same person tested twice. Once sitting, once walking. The creativity tasks were the standard ones psychologists have used for decades to measure how good a brain is at generating novel useful ideas.

81% of participants in the first experiment produced more creative ideas while walking than while sitting. In the second experiment, 88%. In the third, 100%. Every single person walked into a more creative version of themselves. On average, people generated 60% more novel useful ideas the moment their legs started moving.

The skeptical question is the obvious one. Maybe it was the fresh air. Maybe it was the scenery passing by. Maybe it was the change of environment doing the work, not the walking itself.

Oppezzo killed every one of those explanations with one experimental decision. She put people on a treadmill facing a blank wall. No scenery. No fresh air. No environmental change. Just legs moving in place while staring at white drywall. The 60% boost held.

Then she ran the experiment that closed the case completely. She took participants outside in two conditions. Half of them walked through a Stanford courtyard. The other half were pushed through the exact same courtyard in a wheelchair. Same outdoor stimulation. Same scenery passing at the same speed. The only difference was whether the legs were moving.

The walkers produced dramatically more novel high-quality ideas than the wheelchair group. The outdoors did almost nothing on its own. The walking did everything.

She also tested the opposite kind of thinking. Convergent thinking. The kind where there is one right answer and you have to narrow down to it. Word puzzles where 3 words share a hidden fourth word that connects them. The seated participants did slightly better on these. Walkers got slightly worse.

Walking is not a general intelligence enhancer. It does one specific thing. It opens up the divergent search inside your brain. The part that generates options. The part that produces unexpected connections. The part that takes a problem and finds five ways into it instead of one.

When you need to converge on the single right answer, sit down. When you need to find the answer in the first place, get up.

The mechanism is now well understood. Walking selectively activates what neuroscientists call the default mode network, the system inside your brain that runs when you are not consciously focused on anything. The DMN is where mind-wandering happens. Where memories cross-reference each other. Where ideas that have been sitting in separate folders inside your head finally bump into each other.

When you sit at a desk and force yourself to concentrate, you suppress the DMN. When you walk at a natural pace, the executive part of your brain gets just busy enough handling the walking that the DMN comes online and starts doing the work that focus was blocking.

The most useful finding in the entire paper is the one almost nobody quotes. The boost did not turn off the moment people stopped walking. Participants who walked first and then sat back down stayed elevated. Their next round of seated creativity work was still significantly better than people who had been sitting the whole time. The rest lingered for at least several minutes after the legs stopped moving.

You do not need to do creative work while walking. You need to walk before the creative work. The brain holds the state.

114 people died in the Hyatt Regency collapse, and in the US it's the third largest structural collapse fatality count, behind 9/11 and the Pemberton Mill collapse in 1860.

I've learned about this tragedy in my physics classes, to demonstrate tensile strength, and as a reminder about the importance of calculations being done right. I've also learned about it in my legal classes as an example of construction defect lawsuits. I've seen it referenced in disaster response classes.

Between AI and the current Presidential administration, we're barrelling right back towards this nightmare.

There are multiple errors that resulted in this collapse, but these stand out to me:

1. Kansas City was facing high unemployment and needed to attract jobs and business into the city. So the planning and inspection departments may have looked too closely at the designs.

2. An engineering firm too lazy to double check their designs or design changes by the manufacturer before approving them. The error that resulted in the collapse was one that the owner of the engineering firm said that a "first year engineering student" would spot.

3. The steel manufacturer treating preliminary plans as final plans, not verifying the math on their end.

The bridges' original design could only hold 60% of the minimum load required by city code. The design changes recommended by the manufacturer halved that. Less than a year and 3 weeks from opening to the public, the whole thing collapse.

Articles about the collapse say that everyone "trusted" the other party to have done the calculations correctly.

A significant portion of the population trusts what the computer or AI tells them, without checking. Imprecisely calibrated AI hallucinate information. The US economy is going into a downturn and federal regulatory agencies are being gutted.

We are going to see the Hyatt Regency Collapse repeat over and over for decades, not just in buildings, but in medicine, manufacturing, the environment, etc.

Some of this we're just going to have to weather, but the message for AI users comes straight from IBM (once the world's leading computer manufacturer) back in 1979:

"A Computer Cannot Be Held Accountable. Therefore A Computer Should Never Make A Management Decision."

The owner of the engineering firm that designed the Hyatt Regency spent the rest of his life lecturing on the disaster, to serve as a warning to his fellow engineers about the real-life consequences of sloppy design.

I don't think Sam Altman or Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk will have the courage or the honor to do that when OpenAI / Meta / xAI are responsible for getting people killed.

We had some absolutely criminal negligence in the building of the Quebec Bridge, with multiple engineering firms ignoring real signs of structural issues.

There is some debate about this, but most engineers in Canada agree this started a new ritual upon graduation with a B. Eng from any Canadian university. You attend a ceremony upon graduation and are given an Iron Ring.

You wear it on the pinky of your dominant hand, so it touches any paper you are asked to sign. Every time you sign off on something in your capacity as an engineer, you are reminded of your duties and obligations.

I have engineers in my family, and it is considered a sacred oath. Much like doctors, Canadian engineers have an ethos to do no harm.

This was the Sampoong Department Store in Seoul, South Korea.

This happened due to a series of incidents that all came back to the same thing: the owner was not an engineer and made his own modifications to change the building from apartments into a mall and maximize floor space, a sentence that here means "removed a shitload of necessary visible support structures and weakened the remaining ones while skimping on or even skipping necessary interior structures."

The building collapsed only five years after completion.

There was a meeting going on during the collapse as to whether the mall should be evacuated, with its owner-slash-"designer" saying no because he didn't want to lose the sales revenue. He and the other executives, of course, left before terminal collapse. If you're wondering how they pulled that off: the warning signs started in April. The building collapsed on 29 June. The terminal collapse began circa 5p KST and became complete at 5:52p. In between those two times, the owner still refused to close the mall.

502 people died.

This is the second-deadliest non-deliberate building collapse in recorded history.

This is what happens when a greedy person who doesn't know engineering design is allowed to build and own a mall.

Something something Cybertruck....

Something something data center....

Something something AI.

An engineer DID actually try to stop the owner from doing this. He got fired for his pains, although when the courts got involved he was able to show he had no responsibility for the collapse.

Phrases like “that’s certainly a thing”, “it’s so shaped”, or “one of the most animals” (is there a name for this?)

when people write with little to no punctuation like they are just so done

More specifically, asking questions without punctuation i.e. ‘what’ or ‘why’. It’s like, you want to know but also you are resigned to the answer?

When people capitalise The Thing for emphasis - particularly if they add a trademark symbol to really drive The Point™ home

How we use both bold and italic text for emphasis, but they convey it in different ways and I can’t quite explain how