me about real people: therapy is great! it can be super helpful to examine your own patterns in your relationships and to think about which ones might not be serving you anymore. I encourage people to consider it if they have access to it

me about fictional characters: I better not catch even a WHIFF of self-reflection from you, boy. and if I see you sniffing around the Psychology Today ‘find a therapist’ search tool you will live to regret it. what, you’re feeling the urge to talk about your feelings out loud? maybe you should try wiring your jaw shut

I am once again begging you to get your hands on physical media and/or save your fave stuff OFFLINE.

Ancient Greek Coins With Octopuses 🐙

official cephalopod post

reminder that "allies welcome" was once secret code for "those not out yet can still participate without putting themselves at risk", and for those who aren't out yet to comfortably exist in these spaces you have to let allies exist in those spaces too.

this is also important for queer people who don't know anyone else there. let them bring their friend, even if the friend is cishet. many would rather not go at all, rather than go somewhere alone.

It is always better to let respectful cishets into our spaces than to try and police who is queer enough to be allowed.

When I was in high school (2004 - 2008, not that long ago), we had exactly one out person. One.

We also didn't have a Gay Straight Alliance chapter yet. Virtually every support group you could find, even in navy blue states, was a local chapter of the GSA. You were much more likely to find that acronym than LGBTQ+.

Our school decided we wanted one, but we wanted to be inclusive, because we knew there were other letters. We called our group "Spectrum", because it would cover everyone, including allies.

It took three meetings in front of the school's board of directors to get permission for the club to exist. Again, this was a private school, in a mid-Atlantic state that has been navy blue and "progressive" for decades (even at that point).

Other than the one (1) kid who was out? Every single other member said we were Allies.

Nearly 20 years later, almost every single one of us is out as some flavor of queer.

A lot of us knew we were huge supporters of queer rights, we just didn't quite know all the reasons why yet. Asexuality wasn't discussed the way it is now, neither was any type of gender nonconformity. Hell, bisexuality was barely acknowledged, and even then it was mostly only given a nod as "girls who turn guys on by kissing girls" (biphobia was strong, and unfortunately still is).

Making sure allies have a space at our table ensures that people have the space to explore their own identity, to question if one of our labels might work for them too.

It also allows people who may have some baked-in prejudices realize that those prejudices are wrong. That we're not evil and hateful, that we are actually pretty nice and friendly.

One time, some friends and I were at a pretty famous local gay bar, and this guy walked in looking like he was ripped out of the pages of Redneck Magazine. He looked super uncomfortable, but he was polite to the hostess and she sat him alone, near us. A lot of people were tense, and watching him out of the corner of our eyes, because we all knew what happened at Pulse.

But one of my friends is the person who knows absolutely everyone and goes out of their way to make new friends. He's also a cis straight guy. He leans over, compliments the guy's Carhartt jacket, and asks if he's ever been to the place before.

The guy, who is still kind of tense, says his name is Johnny and no, he's never been to no queer bar before, but his sister just came out to the family. Their parents were awful about it, and while he "didn't understand it", he didn't think his sister should be disowned and hated the thought of seeing her cry, so he wanted to try and understand.

I remembered the story that's made the rounds here- about the guy named Earl who went to a drag show and everyone made him feel welcome because they knew he needed to have a good time to prove we queer folks were safe.

So I invited Johnny to sit with us. "It's more fun than sitting alone. Here, have some of my fries, I'm probably not going to finish them anyway."

He sat at our table, and when he found out that my friend was also a cis straight guy, he visibly relaxed. So did a lot of other patrons, once they realized he wasn't there to cause violence.

Over the next few hours, he ate great food, had a couple beers, clapped and smiled at the drag shows, and asked a LOT of questions. At first, he was using language we might call "un-PC" (the kind that would get you cancelled on this webbed site). But he realized we were using different words, and asked. He asked why the old words were wrong, why the newer ones were right, and how not to be offensive.

The staff found out what was going on, and eventually a card got passed around the whole joint and everyone wrote supportive messages for Johnny's sister Lila. This big tough man felt safe enough to cry a little in front of us queer strangers, because we instantly accepted his sister as one of our own, as family, even though we'd never met her.

I'd later found out from the staff that Johnny had returned, more than once. A couple times with Lila herself, and a couple times with his friends... who were gruff and suspicious at first, but won over by the end of the night.

We need to be a safe space for allies. For people who may not use all the Correct And Accepted Special Words but genuinely want to understand and accept us. As someone who is both asexual and nonbinary, I felt way safer with Johnny (despite him using outdated terminology for a while) than I do with a lot of people on THIS QUEER ASS WEBSITE.

Allies are sometimes members of the family that don't even know they're in the closet yet, because they don't know the closer includes people like them.

Allies are sometimes people who don't know the right words or behaviors, but still want to support someone they love.

Scooting over and making a safe, welcoming space for allies will always be important. And it will help us get closer to that world of acceptance we want to see.

My biggest tip for fanfic writers is this: if you get a character's mannerisms and speech pattern down, you can make them do pretty much whatever you want and it'll feel in character.

Logic: Characters, just like real people, are mallable. There is typically very little that's so truly, heinously out of character that you absolutely cannot make it work under any circumstance. In addition, most fans are also willing to accept characterization stretches if it makes the fic work. Yeah, we all know the villain and the hero wouldn't cuddle for warmth in canon. But if they did do that, how would they do it?

What counts is often not so much 'would the character do this?' and more 'if the character did do this, how would they do it?' If you get 'how' part right, your readers will probably be willing to buy the rest, because it will still feel like their favourite character. But if it doesn't feel like the character anymore, why are they even reading the fic?

Worry less about whether a character would do something, and more about how they'd sound while doing it.

I don't remember where I saw this piece of advice so I can't credit it, unfortunately

But it was along the lines of "instead of asking whether something is out of character, ask 'what would it take for this character to do this'"

Which I think fits really nicely with this advice of making the actual action itself also feel in character

being online is so scary aren't you guys worried about the world wide spider

somnophillia is super funny like im honk shoo honk shoo having a good nights sleep and now you must pass the ultimate test of fucking me without waking me by knocking something over or stepping on a crisp packet i've left on my floor. can you finish your mission while my pet geckos judge you from their tanks? because they're not leaving the room okay the geckos stay in here. also the markiplier fnaf playlist stays on. i sleep better when he's screaming.

all kink stuff is playing pretend but with somno you're not playing pretend you're locked in you're comfy cozy you're snug as a bug in a rug and your partner is playing pretend instead

and like. if you're the one awake you're playing pretend so hard right now like ouuuuhhh look at me i'm a scary evil intruder or a demon or vampire or whatever we're doing tonight and now i just have to uhhhh okay shimmy the duvet off and shhh dontfucking breathe so loud and okayyyyy alright now. ah shit they're sleeping in the family guy death pose how the fuck do i get in there how. how do i. help. why are these geckos looking at me.

plus you have to not get too scared when freddy fazbear jumpscares you or else you're waking them up with your screams

oh great and this guy's here in the cuck box wondering if the screaming is me waking up or markiplier dying or toy bonnie throwing a tantrum

ALT

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.

“E.L. Doctorow said once said that ‘Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.’ You don’t have to see where you’re going, you don’t have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice on writing, or life, I have ever heard.”

— Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

stop deactivating

i thought we all agreed we were here forever

Let me tell you a story.

I am an archeologist. I specialize in a somewhat obscure but by no means boring or meaningless Neolithic culture in Germany.

It has a Wikipedia page. A well curated, surprisingly extensive Wiki page that encapsulates all the important information about the culture, including literature references for further research.

One day, we asked Chat GPT about this culture. W were curious which details it would get wrong.

ALL OF THEM, except for the fact that it's a culture in present day Germany.

It didn't even get the chronological time frame wrong and called it a celtic culture.

When we told it it's wrong, it came at us with made up literature sources. Literally made up. It took two well known German archeologist who weren't even active at the same time, added a year - both were already dead - and sold that as source.

And it LITERALLY would only have had to quote Wikipedia to get everything right.

THAT is how unbelievably shitty and wrong all those AIs are.

They are making shit up. They are not sourcing information, they're just slapping words together by their most like relative occurance.

Do not trust ChatGPT or any other so-called AI ever.

The newest Tumblr inside joke was to reply to any and all tutorials or guides with “OP thinks they‘re Jichael”. 

I don’t know who Jichael is.