Dragons & Dreams I Guess

that the tension and grief and anger of anakin’s padawan years would settle (anakin had grown into a jedi obi-wan was incredibly, terribly proud of, after all) and when they no longer had to be generals, they would go on missions together, normal missions where they would negotiate treaties and investigate minor problems off-world and weren’t locked into endless, bloody battle.

that his grand-padawan would be knighted, the padawan he and anakin had trained together, that she would maybe take a padawan on her own someday and his lineage would continue, healing over the broken branches of dooku and qui-gon.

and this, growing old with anakin, leading a normal jedi life with him by obi-wan’s side, living at the temple and eating in the refectory and teaching the initiates, would be obi-wan’s reward for all his grief, all his pain, all he had sacrificed for the order. a humble reward, he would never ask for more, just a simple life with the only family he had ever imagined himself having, the life anakin and ahsoka deserved but hadn’t seen since the start of the war.

im glad that we've established that day one of inquisitor training is How To Look Really Cool

But like, we totally do know why WW1 happened. We know in excruciating detail, it's just that it can't be neatly summarised in a few sentences.

But an extremely over-simplified version of it is:

-- The aftermath of the Industrial Revolution and the collapse of mercantilism as an economic doctrine ushered in an era of free trade between European nations.

-- This exacerbated rivalries between the major powers of Europe (along with the US and Japan), as they now competed to each establish themselves as the main economic powerhouse by pursuing policies of efficiently mass manufacturing products which could then be sold cheaply to undercut local markets. Britain was initially a clear frontrunner in this, but over time Germany and the US began to erode British hegemony.

-- This economic race required previously incomprehensible amounts of resources and manpower, prompting a new wave of imperialism in which multiple countries (chief among them Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Austria-Hungary, the US, and Japan) embarked on massive and brutal imperialist projects in Africa and Asia, ramping up tensions as each nation tried to carve out more land for itself.

-- This necessitated to some extent alliances between European powers to form blocs. This web of alliances was fairly complex, but the key points are that Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Italy were in a three-way alliance; Russia, France, and Britain in a three-way alliance; Germany in an alliance with the Ottoman Empire; the Ottoman Empire in an alliance with Serbia and Bulgaria, and Serbia and Bulgaria in an alliance with Russia.

-- Overlapping with this, the decline of the Ottoman Empire and rise of the German Empire would destabilise political relations in Europe. In the aftermath of the Russo-Turkish War, a war between Russia and the Ottoman Empire motivated in part by Russia's desire to reclaim territories lost in the Crimean War, Bosnia and Herzegovina would be placed under the administration of Austria-Hungary, while remaining nominally an Ottoman territory.

-- As the Ottoman Empire declined further, however, and began to fracture, Austria-Hungary would officially annex Bosnia and Herzegovina, see earlier point about imperialism and the desire for more resources, manpower, and markets. This would end up, for obvious reasons, causing considerable tensions within Bosnia and Herzegovina.

-- Overlapping with this was the rising popularity of Yugoslavism, the idea of a South Slavic Federation, a union of South Slavic countries, or a singular state of Yugoslavia, which would ostensibly counter the expansionist agendas of Germany and Austria-Hungry. The Serbian government was an active supporter of this political ideology, as a common feature of it was the idea that Serbia would act as the 'leader' of this new country.

-- The joint pressures of Yugoslavism and tensions arising from Austria-Hungary's annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina would eventually culminate in the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir presumptive to the throne of Austria-Hungary, by a group of Bosnian Serbs who were members of a student revolutionary group. They were backed in this by the Black Hand, a secret society formed by Serbian army officers, and by Serbian military intelligence.

-- Austria-Hungary sought to respond to this with a military strike against Serbia to both demonstrate its strength and to try and dampen support for Yugoslavism. Except Russia was allied with Serbia, so Austria-Hungary sought support from Germany, who agreed on the condition that Austria-Hungary moved quickly before Russia could pull any of its allies in.

-- Austria-Hungary did not move quickly, being unwilling to attack without full mobilisation of its armies. In the intervening time, France and Russia reaffirmed their alliance and pledged to support Serbia.

-- Austria-Hungary declares war on Serbia.

-- Russia responds, in part because it views this as German pretext for increasing its military capability and reach. Germany is worried over a potential war, but military leaders within Germany urged it to attack Russia and France under the pretext of coming to the aid of its ally, but actually as part of a 'preventative war' plan meant to reduce Russia's military capabilities before the Russian Great Military Program -- oh yeah that's a thing that was happening too -- made it so that Germany could never risk mobilising its military without Russian reprisal.

-- Germany declares war on France, Russia, and Belgium. Britain, allied with France and Russia but more importantly fearing that a German conquest of France could endanger Britain, declares war on Germany.

-- World War I happens.

You know why? He wasn't selling a ton of cars so he asked his workers why they weren't buying any, and they said, when would they use it? They were at work all the time. And when he gave them more time off, they DID buy more cars. His business boomed.

I learned this in high school and I can't find an exact article that words it in that way, but here's something:

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.

Lol so yeah actually the phone line argument is a bit confusing because yeah the phones are down at first, but they obviously were fixed at some point since his family tried to call him from the airport in Paris or later on he wouldn’t be able to order pizzas or call the cops from his house at the end of the whole attempted robbery night, so there IS the question of why Kevin’s family doesn’t keep trying to call him daily.

HOWEVER, as people have already mentioned, Kevin thinks he’s a criminal due to stealing a toothbrush and has already been chased by a cop, he’s not gonna contact the police about the robbers.

Calling the police about his family leaving him? He’s not gonna do that because he doesn’t KNOW they’re in Paris, Kevin believes he magically wished his family out of existence the night before they left after they were all right dicks to him. He doesn’t know they have the power to come back, that’s why he asks Santa to return them later on, what use is telling the cops who (in his eyes) will probably blame him for it?

Also ppl be criticizing him for the booby traps like this isn’t the THIRD time Kevin’s had to chase these guys off his property? First he tried to fake a house party, they still came back, he tried to fake a MURDER, they spied on him and declared they were coming back again. Kevin’s given them two nonviolent chances to leave his house alone, they’re the grown men deciding they’re gonna come back and rob a house they KNOW has an eight year old in it. They announce their presence by knocking and taunting that they know he’s alone and “helpless” in there and that they’re coming in anyway, what their original plans for dealing with him were, we don’t know. After they spring his first traps, their plan switches from robbing the house to specifically harming Kevin in revenge.

These guys are trespassing on Kevin’s property AGAIN after multiple warnings, and they’ve announced themselves with a declaration of intent to harm him, he can’t call the police or they’ll discover he vanished his family and committed toothbrush crimes, Kevin needed to defend himself and he had FULL RIGHT to do so however he saw fit (which all proved entirely necessary seeing as literally nothing he threw at these men actually stopped them from trying to hurt him, they kept coming until his neighbor saved him)

Azula worked to earn Ozai's love, and she did gain his favor (not love, obviously), though we see her crumble when he leaves her behind in the finale. She says 'You can't treat me like Zuko!' as in, 'you can't not love me like Zuko, after all I've done to earn it.' She views love as an entirely tangible exchange, she observed what Oazi wanted and used it to earn attention and praise. I guess even her manipulation of Mai and Ty Lee were ways to 'earn' their 'love.'

This PSA has been brought to you by the four fawns and does that ran out in front of me at various points on my drive home.