No one seems to be acknowledging the far funnier element of this, which is, that when you go to the commenter’s account, you find out they are actually fucking roleplaying as a sexually repressed skeleton and jjst really committed to the bit while everyone in the reblogs is talking about how much they hate minors or whatever. thank you kharak the skeleton servant of the almighty lich king
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I'm taking a short break after finishing Tai Sui book 3 to prepare mentally for book 4.
But all I can think about are the everpresent underlying themes of marriage/love linked with funerals/death that haunt the narrative. It's honestly so intriguing seeing them almost always show up together as a pair. (rant below)
The ones that come up to me from the top of my head are:
• underworld marriage plot from book 1 (first instance of the themes intertwining as a main subject of discussion);
• jiangli and xi ping;
• hxj and lin chi (with possible heavy mirroring to the pair above);
• xu rucheng and a-hua;
• symbolism of sparrows (referenching the sparrow in "eternal flame" arc that got killed by zhuoming's lotuses);
• adding to the previous point: the whole charade with naming zhuoming "lovesickness" and I quote:
• also mentions from "eternal flame" arc:
I don't really know where I'm trying to get with this one. I love the way this trope haunts the narrative almost imperceptibly, just like Jiangli and Hxj do for the rest of the novel after their "noble sacrifices" to save someone dear to them.
The fact that makes this better is the way the novel is not constructed on amorous relationships between characters, but the linkage is still relevant to the immersive world building. Ans as previously stated, almost always you get one of them mentioned and it's closely followed by the other.
Other examples of platonic (mostly familial) relations that arguably rely on love/care that are closely followed by death include:
• Old Madam Xi and her grandchildren;
• A-xiang with her grandfather and Chunying;
• Yu Chang and his mom.
Was debating adding Pang Jian and his sister here too, but at the same time his story leans more into the irony of fate; with deers usually being a simbolism of longevity - possibly linking into how he became part of the pavillion and started cultivation after the incident. I first read the scene in 2023 when I stopped my read of Tai Sui after "demon country" arc and the one thing I remembered vividly WAS his backstory.
AUGH MAN I LOVE THE WRITING IN THIS NOVEL SO MUCH. The details, reoccurences and mannerism of characters are everything to me right now. That's the scary part.
The mannerism and relationships are the reason I cry over the Xi brothers so much. And friend made me so scared to read after telling me I won't survive to the end of the novel when I started bawling over Xi Yue saying he's "safe at home" at the xi courtyard.
Doomed fate, doomed novel, doomed everything.
AAAAAAAAAAAAA
OK RANT'S OVER thank you for coming to my TedTalk even tho the end paragraph took it in a bit of another direction.
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poem i wrote for @montereybayaquarium and @mbari-blog's winter art theme. (day 11's theme was precious, which is exactly how i felt about these kids.)
full poem text underneath the cut.
based on my very real experience of working at an underfunded elementary school and being the under-trained lead teacher for a week while they learned about the ocean.
Whale fall
Room 303 is learning about the ocean
I'm reading them a book about whale fall
They listen, rapt, eyes wide and mouths
open like so many gasping fish
"Ew" and "Gross" and shrieks ready behind
the ridges of their gums
But they refrain, for now,
Too entranced by the cycle of life
The cycle of death
The cycle of nourishment
A closed loop, a noose, an engagement ring,
the rotating plate of a microwave
Room 303 goes to recess
I watch over them and wonder
If they know they're dancing in whale fall
If they know how thoroughly they may be failed
If they do not learn to sustain themselves on scraps
Life flourishes, in the deepest oceans, in the coldest climates,
in the ribcage of the whale, in the belly of the beast
Life can flourish here, too
That's what I tell myself
The children of Room 303 will feast one day
They will inherit the earth in a state unfit to be passed down
They will rage and resent and renew
And I will regret, already do
regret, not serving them as an anchor longer
For rusting all the way through
The children of Room 303 do not belong there any more than I did
May they be guided by their own light
May they wield their bioluminescence with conviction and joy
May they grow into a thousand forms that have yet to be discovered
But for today, let them dance in the whale fall
Let them think this is all the world is
And find peace in ignorance of abundance
And find joy in the taste of what trickles down to them
Also important to note they’re not random leaches found outside obviously. They’re “sterile” or as sterile as an animal can be, bred in specific environments and kept clean in the lab.
for those unaware, the spaghetti wall of letters and numbers is a base64-encoded JPEG image (and not a URL as some guessed). in certain cases when you tried to insert/paste an image into what’s ostensibly a text-only box, this could happen.
the thing that’s bugging me however is that there’s image data there. we have fairly a clear (albeit with JPEG artifacts) screenshot of text that, thanks to how Windows ClearType renders text, each character is identical to each other, that is to say, an uppercase Q will always look more or less pixel-perfect each time, meaning we don’t have to guess what a Q looks like, we simply have to pixel-accurate match it.
as an aside, this is why regular OCR struggles so much with this kind of data retrieval, such as code even when it’s clearer than a physical paper scan. ordinarily, OCR will try to best-guess every single letter because it expects each letter to be slightly different from each other (as would be the unpredictable nature in a scanned document), and on top of that most OCR today will try to autocorrect because it expects the scanned text to contain words in some human written language.
so, all we have to do is make a program to recognize each character and piece back together the whole base64 string, right? well…
first i stitched all 7 images back into a single block of text, observing the consistency of the line spacing. some of the screenshots have little bits of the previous one sticking out of it, which helps with alignment and to make sure they’re in the right order.
after that i had to sample every single letter off this file. this means going around the file and finding one example of each different character we’re trying to identify, saving it as its own separate file so that the program can load them as references to compare against in the full image. for base64, the alphabet consists of a-z, A-Z, 0-9, +, / and =. once i had the initial code in place…
…close! but oh so far. if any one single character in a base64 string is wrong or missing, the resulting decode will be wrong. the issues i was having were mostly with the lowercase r and j because of how the kerning affected the pixels around those letters. i was also getting false matches for r where there should be an m. what followed was grueling hours of tweaking the matching code and my known font set to better fit the original image and get as close as possible to a 100% match. here is the resulting code, maybe it’ll be useful for someone and this won’t have been a complete waste of time.
once i was confident through the verification image that i had all characters recognized, i put it through a base64 to JPEG decoder. i actually did this several times as i improved the recognition and what follows is the best result that came out of it yet. i suspect some of the data might be missing (perhaps a line or block of text got lost in between screenshots), or i have a wrong character somewhere resulting in a wrong value. this is the image extracted from OP’s base64 string:
we can finally know what they meant when they said “me in a relationship” and i can finally go the fuck to sleep.
update: i found that the string that i used to decode the image in the previous reblog actually had one letter wrong.
with this it still doesn’t parse as fully valid base64 in strict mode so i think there’s still another letter in there that’s wrong, but i couldn’t find it. however this gives us a better look:
and this is finally enough to do a reverse image search. i present to you, the HD version of our intrepid massive backpacker:
still have no idea what they mean by “me in a relationship” with that, though.
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whenever you see C#m on a chord sheet you know the musician was just playing bar chords and couldn’t resist the temptation of the most annoying chord in the god damn book
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Droodles by Roger Price (from his 1953 book). Droodles (a blend of “doodle”, “drawing”, “riddle”) are simple drawings with a witty, often absurd, caption. The first one, as some of you may know, was used by Frank Zappa for his 1982 album, Ship Arriving Too Late to Save a Drowning Witch. (Zappa, a fan of Price's work, lived just a few miles from the artist and personally sought permission to use the image.)
