An old goat stuck in a teen human body.

it is good to fill up a page with lots of something. it looks cool even if the drawings are bad

it is good to draw small objects you like

it is good to draw yourself (in a mirror, specifically, although little goofy cartoons? also great) 

no need to erase or scribble over things you mess up - write a little regretful note next to em (if that) and move on. i learned this in 4th grade and believe it vehemently. 

No matter how injured. If a parent doesn't deem it necessary to see a doctor, it doesn't happen. Teachers can suggest a doctor visit, but unless it's a very acute injury (and even then), it's ultimately up to the parents.

You can be 13. Twisted, maybe broken ankle. You teacher lets you sit out in PE. She's concerned, and tells you to rest when you go home, and see a doctor. You get home, ur parents fill a bath and add some Epsom salts, and then laugh at you for using it moms old colorguard stick as a cane. Take some ibuprofen they say. It's just a little sprain, ur a kid.

You go to school the next day, go to ur office assistant time. Office calls ur mom to come get you, because you're clearly in too much pain for school. Your mom laughs when she gets you, says you just were so determined not to miss school. Scolds you for making the office ladies worry.

You never see a doctor for the injury.

Your parents come into the exam room at every visit. This does not stop with age, except for gynecologist. But your parents are on the medical release forms. They fill them out for you, with you. You do not get to take them off.

You never get to tell s doctor about the ankle. Even though it never quote healed right, and it hurts every day.

Then your 18. In college. Still on your parents insurance, and have no car. The on campus clinic only does std testing. You fall down some stairs. Same injury. You call your parents, crying from the pain. You are using a mop as a cane. They console you and say to have a bath, take some meds, and let them know how it feels in a few days. You end up borrowing your roommates rolling chair to get around for the weekend.

By Monday, you can walk again. You walk miles to class every day. You ask to see a doctor, but your parents won't drive the hour to come take you, and you don't have the insurance card. You are still at their mercy for medical care. The ankle tries to heal again. This time worse than before. The tendons click with every step.

Now you're in your twenties. Finally have your own healthcare. You see a doctor. You get to mention the ankle! They say it's been too long to really even know what was damaged. That you have arthritis now. It healed wrong but it can no longer be fixed.

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.

So he makes these jokes about calling himself hot, but this comment later makes it pretty clear they're just that-- jokes.

All this stuff he says about being an archetype, too. Guy resigned to his lot in life, pretends he loves it. We know the tune well!

Interesting that does his cheeky little motioning-to-his-own-body move from his "ain't I a hottie" jokes, by the way. Put a pin in that.

Anyways, he's insisting he's choosing to be who he is, right after referring to becoming "who he is" as "becoming part of the machine." He's lying again, about liking the way he is. Duh, right?

Exhibit A: The highly marketable maid outfit.

Canonically transgender character has some interesting comments about this. Comments that echo Jax's mysterious comments about Zooble from earlier.

Now, I'm not always the best at this, but the only connection I can think of between Zooble, bartenders, and tattoo artists, is that they're all..........kind of dykey? It's giving "two toxic homosexuals interact at atarbucks." But that might just be me.

Wow, Jax, making fun of your own romantic prospects on the basis of your gender in relation to the hypothetical romantic partner? Interesting choice! It would be a shame if it stopped being straight somehow.

Oops! I tripped, and Jax's very particular metaphor for having his deeper feelings and true desires revealed fell out of my pocket!

.................which could mean anything!

Anyways, I now draw your attention back to his particular word choice when he jokes at the expense of his own appearance:

I swear there was another instance of him joking about his appearance specifically in regards to masculinity but I can't remember where. You get my drift though.

He's not the pinnacle of masculinity, and he knows he's not, so he jokes about it-- because it's funny! It's funny that he's not a "real man!"

Being funny-- that's a type of guy you can be, even if everything about being a man doesn't appeal to you!

It's a role! A role he can fulfill! His role that he's stuck with, that he's given up on fighting. The funny one. Nothing else underneath the funny egshell, thank you very much!

There's just no use even thinking about changing who he is. That would just be depressing! And it's no good to anyone if the funny one can't be funny. If he can't fulfill his role. If he ever wants anything else, anything more genuine.

There are also a couple of asks she answered that also come to mind:

The first two make me think of the advertising for the maid Jax plush (sorry that the dialogue is slightly different; the video doesn't have subtitles in English so I chose French>>English):

The third ask reads to me like he probably has some internalized misogyny. However, all of them have multiple possible explanations; these responses aren't definitive.

HOWEVER however, Goose has stated in a LOT of asks how she projects onto Jax and has stated she relates to him the most. This can easily include any struggles she's had/having with her gender identity.

Also, anybody commenting "Why is her hair greasy. She needs to wash her hair" needs to step outside the house like atleast once in their life. Girl just won a fencing competition and she was wearing one of these 👇 the whole time

are one of the greatest things

we have in the world

Never have I been this invested into tumblr sexyman contest before. Its just...so dang funny. XD

Part 1

So of course, I NEEDED TO DRAW SOMETHING! To celebrate for my favs! I love how close it was for both of them. Shows how beloved these two characters are for everyone.

P.S: contest is still ongoing, so go vote for Caine or maybe your other favorite characters over at @sexy-people-contests-2026 who made it to the next round.

Tumblr contest by @sexy-people-contests-2026

There is nothing sexier than a compassion-based revolutionary, so allow me to tell you just how sexy The Boy Saviour really is:

While every other revolutionary in Zaun cares about winning against Piltsover no matter what, Ekko actually cares about the people of Zaun, which is why his focus is on community organising. Yeah, he'll kick some ass when he needs to and look damn good while doing it, but he found a tree growing in the under-city despite all odds, built an entire sanctuary around it, and he refuses to turn anyone away because he has so much compassion in his heart 🥹

2. Ekko has compassion for his enemies while also not letting that cloud his judgement (except for one time against Jinx but the Timebomb shippers would argue that makes him sexier) which is such a rare but important trait to have as a revolutionary. He's someone who understands the necessity of violence, but he doesn't revel in it. He may chew out his oppressors on the Piltsover Council, but his only demand is that they give his people the rights and respect they deserve, because then he wouldn't have to fight against other less compassionate "revolutionaries" who are taking advantage of the people's desperation.

3. Ekko may be tough as nails to outsiders, but under the surface, he is a tender-hearted young man who was forced to grow up way too fast. His father figure was murdered and his crush was groomed to become a murderer by the very man who killed him. Ekko lost his whole found family in the course of a few days, and despite all that, Ekko never grew up to be resentful or give into despair. Instead, he made it his goal to fight like hell for a better future, no matter the cost to himself, so no other child would have to go through what he did or carry the same weight as he does.

4. Ekko was so right about everything that in Season 2 the writers had to send him to another dimension so he wouldn't expose all the flaws in his centrist messaging. Did you read that? If being a compassion-based revolutionary is the sexiest thing ever, then that means Ekko was sexy enough to scare the writers of Arcane, and the show was made actively worse for it. If they embraced Ekko's correctness and sexiness, we could've had an amazing Season 2.

5. Following on from him being sent to another dimension, this was one where he was given the peaceful life he was denied: his adopted father is still alive, his crush was never taken in by a drug lord, and Ekko could have spent the rest of his days in that peaceful reality, but he still chooses to go back to the world that is cold and hard and cruel. Why? Because the people in his reality still needed him! (And because he didn't want to steal this life from the Ekko of this peaceful reality.) That is so profoundly selfless, and so utterly sexy of him.

Ekko has so much love in his heart for everyone and everything. He won't burn the world down for you, but he will change it for the better so you can finally live in peace. It is far, far easier to destroy the world than change it, which makes it the undeniably sexiest choice a man can make for you. And that is why...