art blog(derogatory)

Janaina Medeiros
Sweet Seals For You, Always
trying on a metaphor

shark vs the universe

ē„ę„ / Permanent Vacation
todays bird
almost home
occasionally subtle

blake kathryn

Product Placement
RMH

romaā
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
noise dept.
wallacepolsom

TVSTRANGERTHINGS
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@onetwistedmiracle

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I know weāve talked about this before but the retroactive realization for Shane Hollander that Ilya has been his future husband the entire time must have sent that boy spinning. What do you mean I introduced myself to my future husband. What do you mean my husband was there standing beside me the day I got drafted. What do you mean I jerked off to thoughts of my husband on the most important day of my entire life up to then. What do you mean my husband took my virginity. My husband and I watched each other grow up. My husband and I fell in love for the first time together. My husband was my first ex. My husband has been the most consistent, sensual, irritating, understanding, solid, loving presence in my entire life. Since I became a man, the thoughts I have reached for to comfort myself or bring myself pleasure have been those of my husband. I memorized the moles on my future husbandās body before I fully understood the wants and needs of my own. My husband taught me how to pleasure a man by pleasuring me. The first person I willingly came out to was my husband. My friends have NEVER known me at a time in my life when I was not in love with my husband.
kissssssss
This is so not important, but it is still eating my brain. Help?
Who was the first fictional hockey man to kiss his fictional boyfriend on the ice after winning the Stanley Cup: Scott Hunter, Jack Zimmerman, or some other fictional character that I haven't mentioned?
ie, who published it first: Ngozi Ukazu, or Rachel Reid?
Fanfiction exists for TWO reasons:
Dealing with complex thoughts and emotions I can't work through in therapy, like grief, despair, a complicated relationship with pain and addiction
Seeing the same characters fuck over amd over again
three reasons:
I just love them, your honor

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There was this woman poet in 4th century China called Su Hui (čč), 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 (ēē£å) - 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: åæ (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:
ä»ęŗę·å¾·ččåļ¼
č²åæēƤēµčŖē©¹č¼ļ¼
欽ęęę³å¦ę·«čļ¼
åæęå¢ę ę·ę å·ć
In pinyin, it is:
Rén zhì huÔi dé shèng yú tÔng,
zhÄnzhƬ dĒ zhÅng shƬ qióng cÄng,
qÄ«n suĒ gĒnxiĒng wĆ ng yĆn huÄng,
xÄ«n yÅu zÄng mù huĆ”i cĒn shÄng.
Notice how it rhymes? tĆ”ng / cÄng / huÄng / shÄng
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:
å·ę ę·ę å¢ęåæļ¼
čę·«å¦ę³ęę欽ļ¼
č¼ē©¹čŖēµēƤåæč²ļ¼
åččå¾·ę·ęŗä»ć
The pinyin:
ShÄng cĒn huĆ”i mù zÄng yÅu xÄ«n,
huÄngyĆn wĆ ngxiĒng gĒn suĒ qÄ«n,
cÄngqióng shƬ zhÅng dĒzhƬ zhÄn,
tÔng yúshèngdé huÔi zhì rén.
It rhymes too: xÄ«n and qÄ«n, zhÄn and rĆ©n
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:
č©©åēēļ¼å§å¹³čę°ć "The poem-picture of the Armillary Sphere, by Su of Shiping."
Or reversed:
čę°č©©åļ¼ēēå§å¹³ć "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 (åŗ·č¬ę°) devoted his entire life to the poems (kangshiw.com/contents/461/2ā¦), 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", ēē£åč©©č®ę³) 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%87ā¦).
Incredibly, there's even far more complexity to the Xuanji Tu than just the poems:
- The name ēē (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 (äŗč”) - 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.
This would be a stunning achievement painted, more impressive embroidered, but she wove this in silk brocade?!? Wrote a palindromic poem so epic no one else has come close for a couple millennia, and then wove it?
Silk brocade is a whole different level of intricate difficulty. It makes just about anything else you might choose to do with yarn look easy.
this is freaking amazing
Exclusive: Instacartās AI pricing may be inflating your grocery bill.
Gonna get myself a fun little surprise I guess
This is better than I'd ever hoped for, I bet a rat could kill you with that thing by firing a laser back in time and electrocuting your grandfather
Just look at this thing
The rat gun is hereeeeee!
This is getting notes again so I will admit that "rat gun" was an autocorrect error and it was supposed to be "ray gun."
But it'll always be a rat gun to me.
The most expensive thing in these pictures was the cat, and he was $60.
I'll be honest--I forgot that the pump organ desk/bar was visible in the background, and it was NOT under $60.
It was actually $75.
The chairs, however, were paid for in human life. I inherited them; they were originally my great grandmother's. But they're not particularly rare-- you can find these exact chairs without a lot of effort, in reasonable shape, for not that much money. They made a lot of them.
your gazelle has a pearl choker
That's Hadrian. He's a bush buck and he loves fashion.
Hi you asked this question and I immediately went to the pottery studio to make a calcifer to put in my woodstove.
Will update if he survives the kiln.
i am still on tenterhooks vis a vis calcifer š„ŗš„ŗš„ŗ
I just brought him home from the pottery studio and wired him for light. He lives!!!!!
OP just wondering do you like have the closet to Narnia tucked in there somewhere?
Dude, c'mon, these things take time.
Give me a couple hours.
Okay!! We have doordrobe! It's not quite done but after nearly turning myself into an hellpancake while carrying this in from the garage to the house, I feel like I should call it a night.
Right now it's not going into a secret room (but the Angel of Death (And WiFi) behind it does have a secret compartment for my router? Does that count) but Malice and Vice are still exploring it like it's a whole new world.
The House of Horrors continues to be...well, exactly what it is.
Oh, no, all radioactive materials go in The Box.
please explain. Do you actually have a lead lined box for radioactive objects, or are you just talking about the router behind the painting?
The Box.
Not people's teeth, no.
Holy shit. This just keeps getting better and better. Absolutely marvelous house. What other treasures do you have in that house?
I recently got some very silly dishes and a telescope!
All of these accusations of witchcraft! As if the vibe in this house could be any more clearly Artificer.
Joy and whimsy detected! This house is joyful and whimsical!
Trump allies would love an excuse to step up their crackdown. Nonviolence, both disciplined and open-hearted, must define the day
no paywall on this
see you at the No Kings rally? i'll be wearing yellow and carrying a sign and laughing and dancing, like a patriotic american
The government does not track how often immigration agents grab citizens. So ProPublica did. Our tally ā almost certainly incomplete ā inclu

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Tumblr Code.
If I ever see any of you in public, the code is āI like your shoelacesā
that way we know weāre from tumblr without revealing anything
Iām just going to say this to strangers until i find a tumblr person
must keep reblogering!! Im going to be so suspicious if any one tells me this now!
Remember the answer is: I stole them from the president.
always reblog tumblr identification
good god this just crossed my dash in the year of our lord 2023
I LIKE YOUR SHOELACES??? IN THE YEAR OF OUR LORD 2024??
Letās take it to 4 million, folks!
almost there!
TO 4 MILLION!!!!!!!!!
THE ORIGINAL SHOELACES POST?? ON MY DASH IN 2024??
By god, a corner stone of our culture, I thought it lost to time!
and now in 2025!
What is the most relevant-to-today political drama and why is it a low-budget 90s sci-fi called Babylon 5
Weāve documented nearly 50 incidents of immigration officers shattering car windows to make arrests ā a tactic experts say was rarely used b
the united states is being deliberately, systematically and thoroughly destroyed.
There's a good chance your zone shifted when the USDA updated its plant hardiness map in 2023. Zoom in on what that means for your garden.
Fucking killer story map from NPR. A+++
This is fantastic!
One important takeaway from this article, if you're a gardener, is that there's a corresponding Heat Zone Map put together by the American Horticultural Society that isn't widely known.
With tools like the USDA plant hardiness map, we typically only consider low winter temperatures as the primary metric by which we determine
They're trying to implement this info more in the Hardiness Zone map, but trying to account for too many factors in a single metric runs the risk of muddling the metric, so it's worth considering them separately.
thereās a website where you put in two musicians/artists and it makes a playlist that slowly transitions from one musicianās style of music to the otherās
itās really fun
lady gaga -> napalm death takes a weird detour through epic rap battles of history
This is actually really useful for finding music thatās in between genres that I wouldnāt know to look for.
This has nothing to do with books but itās COOL
I feel like this could be useful for trying to slowly pull yourself away from your depression music to something more uplifting without it being jarringā¦
Link above is broken, so here:
JFC it worked š®

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I love me a pseudo-historical arranged marriage au but it always nudges my suspension of disbelief when the author has to dance around the implicit expectation that an arranged marriage should lead to children, which a cis gay couple can't provide.
I know for a lot of people that's irrelevant to what they want from an Arranged Marriage plot, but personally I like playing in the weird and uncomfortable implications.
So, I've been thinking about how you would justify an obviously barren marriage in That Kind of fantasy world, and I thought it'd be interesting if gay marriage in Ye Old Fantasy Land was a form of soft disinheritance/abdication.
Like, "Oh, God, I don't want to be in this position of power please just find me a boy to marry", or, "I know you should inherit after you father passes but as your stepmother/legal guardian I think it'd make more sense if my kids got everything, so maybe consider lesbianism?", or "Look, we both know neither of our families has enough money to support that many grandkids, so let's just pair some spares and save both our treasuries the trouble".
Obviously this brings in some very different dynamics that I know not everyone would be pinged by, but I just think it'd be neat.
This is actually a really cool variant solution to a real historical problem, wherein either primogeniture or other profoundly shitty customs led to wealthy parents having insufficient resources to provide for all of their children in a manner consistent with their station.
Historically, the Church and its widespread monastic structure functioned as a dumping ground for second/third/etc sons and all the daughters one can't afford to marry off adequately, with the military eventually picking up the slack for the former post-Reformation to the point where it's been argued that the need for something to occupy these dispossessed sons played a role in Europe's ongoing conflicts between its nations and the eventual push of imperialism and colonization over the rest of the world.
In a world where homosexuality were more accepted, it would offer a new option: spare a comparatively-small outlay of resources from the main family fortune to equip a house and accoutrements, which would be reabsorbed into the family as a return inheritance in a few decades, and contract a marriage which would be deliberately unable to produce legitimate offspring.
You get the advantages of creating marital ties with another wealthy family, the people married therein have a spouse and the status achievements that go with marriage, and the risk that your child goes off and marries someone unsuitable or inconvenient is removed entirely, as is the risk that they could marry someone and have legitimate, inheritance-claiming children with them. Sure, they can have affairs and thus get children if they're married to a same-sex spouse, but those children cannot be passed off as legitimate issue of the marriage, and so they pose less of a threat to the the main body of the family's wealth.
And, thus: perfectly reasonable reason why your pseudohistorical fictional characters can find themselves in a same-sex arranged marriage!
"Nicholas, we've arranged for you to marry Eric, in the neighboring kingdom."
"But father, I'm not...."
"I'm well aware. I've just decided that you shouldn't reproduce."
Another benefit would be built in foster/adoptive parents to your legitimate grandchildren, should the heirs you ask to reproduce do so and then die (or fuck off) before said children are old enough to take care of themselves.
As Dan Savage has pointed out, gay couples can be there to absorb the "extra" children in a society.
No uniforms. No badges. Wearing masks to hide their faces.
ICE are not police. They have no training. They have no oversight. No disciplinary recourse.