Asa Femcel Mitaka

自知면 晩知고 補知면 早知라

which roughly translates to "To learn alone is to learn late; to learn with help is to learn early" but. when said out loud, it becomes "If it's a dick, touch it; if it's a pussy, fuck it"

This was also allegedly his slogan for advertising his poetry skills when he was low on money, and I have to say it's a great way to show them what you're offering.

+For anyone interested, this was the original for the one mentioned in the tweet:

書堂乃早知 (서당내조지)

房中皆尊物 (방중개존물)

生徒諸未十 (생도제미십)

先生來不謁 (선생내불알)

Translation (for the Chinese meaning):

Though I knew this was a place of teaching,

I did not expect these nobilities!

The students are no more than ten,

Stop backing up my fucking files.

Stop asking me to back up my fucking files.

Stop taking my fucking files off my fucking computer.

I don't want a fucking reminder in three fucking days. Let me fucking say no.

Here's a text tutorial to get rid of that shit on Windows 11.

Here's a video tutorial to get rid of that shit on Windows 10.

Here's a video tutorial to get rid of that shit on Windows 11.

their (live!) young gestate for. wait for it. eight to eighteen (??) YEARS. can have up to 10 at a time. good grief.

longest lifespan of any vertebrate, up to five hundred years

toxic flesh

has giant eyes but is usually blind because of a weird little crustacean that's evolved to live on and eat their eyes. this doesn't seem to bother them much.

lives in deep cold water and has the lowest swim speed and tail-beat frequency for its size across all fish species. just generally lives life in extreme slow motion

largest genome of any shark

eats everything including moose and polar bears

The closest I found to her actually saying that is:

"When peace comes we will perhaps in time be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our sons, but it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons. Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us."

The Index pretty strongly evokes the concept of religion enforcing status quo. It correlates the blind belief between God and The World As Is as similar. Prescripts are either seen as morally neutral or exalted by their purponents, despite being arbitrary regurgitation of the thoughts of the city's masses. Fitting then that Rien would be following the prescripts to make a family without ever considering if its what he wanted for himself, and feeling utter apathy about it. He became a father because "that is what men do". The prescripts, the status quo, God, told him to.

Through that he detaches both any responsibility for his child and any genuine connection he can form. The parenthood is a facade. His relationship to young Yoshihide is distinctly hollow, his deadpan calm feeling like he's barely present in the moment. He is only playing The Father- a role in the "play" if you'll forgive the Angela PTSD flashbacks- because it is what his God required of him. Because of this we can never really know how much he loved his child. We can't know if his aversion to endings was ordained by God or if that was his single independent thought, representing his anxiety of Yoshihide inevitably turning into her Muga form. His inscrutability IS HIS NEGLECT.

All that ties in nicely with the implications of him sexually assaulting Shiomi. Not only did he impregnate her because his role of a father was demanded by status quo- that it's "what men do" again- but also because the role of the mother is what "women do" and was forced on Shiomi. A woman belonging to a faction DEFINED BY THEIR FREEDOM, roaming the world as ronin, suddenly caged to raise a child she does not care for. Her freedom was exchanged for the Prescript's usage of her womb to further its goals against her will.

His whole bootleg Roland schtick adds to this- he is a replication of a character very much defined by his genuine love for his wife and eagerness to start a family. Roland was devastated when he lost these things- Rien, not so much. At least not on a level we ever see surface. He is a pallid mockery of a happy marriage and a beloved child. Also worth noting how the supposed blueprint of a happy marriage and beloved child is so transient- Angelica died before she could carry their child to term. Rien's relation to this is very... fascist cottagecoresque. Of course his mimicry of it was founded on abuse and disaster- it never really happened.

The project to turn Yoshihide into a Concept Assassin is also potentially tied into this reading, though I may struggle to articulate this part. To raise a child from birth isolated from anyone who isn't her parents, to be nothing more than a tool that seeks out and destroys anything not uniform with the Fingers... NOT UNIFORM WITH HOW SHE WAS RAISED... though this power ends up representing escaping her childhood trauma by quite literally cutting her parents out of her life, what the Fingers meant it to be still remains an important factor in reading Rien imo.

For Canto 9's narrative goals, Rien and Shiomi were put at the forefront representing a typical coerced marriage. To ignore this aspect of the two- Rien as a sexually abusive husband and Shiomi as a victim who takes it out on her child- is to ignore the themes of Canto 9 as a whole.

Rien is the Spider. Shiomi is the Butterfly. Just as Ryoshu and Araya were trapped in his web, so too was Shiomi, only since the beginning. The web was present for each three generations.

“Unraveling the Linothorax Mystery, or how Linen Armor Came to Dominate our Lives.”

While all of this mayhem (both scientifically controlled and free-form) convinced us that our linothorax was ancient-battlefield-ready, we still felt compelled to try a real-life scenario, so Scott donned the armor and Greg shot him. And while we had confidence in our armor, our relief was still considerable when the arrowhead stuck and lodged in the armor’s outer layers, a safe distance away from flesh.

Reconstructing Ancient Linen Body Armor: Unravelling the Linothorax Mystery - Gregory S. Aldrete, Scott Bartell, Alicia Aldrete, 2013. and here's the "they shot a guy" pic, with one of my favourite captions ever