the nearest depiction of an animal or other sentient fantasy creature to you at this moment comes to life right where it is (i.e. cat photograph, shark plushie, dragon painting, etc)

assume it doesn’t know you (unless it’s actually a specific animal you’ve met) and that it’s normal for its species and would do whatever was natural for it. including being too giant for and destroying the room it’s in. as well as dying immediately if its environment can’t support its life

getting lost in boston is fun because I turned around on a street corner three times and some guy yelled "hey stupid! the bus is that way!" very helpful interaction and accurate insult, 10/10 no notes

one time I walked around a building a couple times looking for a bathroom and this guy went "this bitch thinks she's on a merrygoround, where the fuck are you tryna go? bathroom? one floor down to the right behind the door that says bathroom."

My very first time in Boston. I was absolutely miserable, trying to drag my giant suitcase up a lengthy set of stairs in the pouring rain. This guy who had already reached the top looked back at me with the most pure expression of disgust I’ve ever seen in anyone’s eyes, marched back down the stairs, grabbed my suitcase, carried it to the top, left it there for me, and walked away without ever saying a word. I think about him often.

For the people in the notes going "why is Boston like this": a) the insults are a way to show you have no ulterior motives when helping someone (and don't need to be thanked or repaid), and b) Boston was settled by the Irish

also the Italians. mixing Irish and Italian sociocultural attitudes had the effect of multiplying the Sass Levels by the power of infinity, in the sense that you get all of the clever dry wit of the Irish and all of the bitchy gossipy condensation of the Italians rolled into one very stereotypically overly-friendly American package.

also worth noting that who you are to them doesn’t matter. they’ll talk to strangers like that and will also talk to their best friends like that. they’re just Like That.

More from the notes:

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.

okay i wanna play. what's the first song on your wrapped that has a color in the title?

Tbh germ theory DOES sound crazy. Like if you told a regency-era nobleman that tiny creatures lived on the surface of everything and THAT’S what causes consumption, they’d be like “ah, I see you are a lunatic. Would you reside in my hermitage? Rantings and ravings do so amuse my guests”

But if you told a Medieval person this they would probably go "Ah, so when the miasma settles on surfaces it gains evil life. I understand."

Yeah, actually, it would probably be pretty easy to explain germ theory to a Medieval person as tiny evil spirits that live on everything, but they can be purified by soap and water, or by alcohol, because that is why God has granted us those things. And because they can float in the air, if you cough or sneeze after they have infested you, that can cause them to infest others. And when you are sick, the angels God has deputized to defend the bodies of His beloved children are at war with the evil spirits, and, sadly, sometimes they lose, but the best way to help your angels win their battle is to rest, drink plenty (this would probably be small beer in this time period, not water, because the water was also infested), stay clean, and for the sake of God do not allow anyone to let your blood, for the angels need that blood in their war against the evil spirits. Bloodletting is good for some types of illnesses but not the kinds caused by the tiny evil spirits.

"There's no hope for the future." And that's how they felt during the Atomic Age, during the World Wars, during the Enlightenment Revolutions, during thr plagues, during the Viking raids, during the fall of Rome.

Yet, we persisted.

CS Lewis had something to say about this

Been feeling a bit hopeless of late. Wasn't expecting to stumble across a quote that would fundamentally alter my perspective and make me cry during my lunch break but here we are

This is an excellent sentiment.

✨ Please reblog the polls to make them reach out to as many people as possible, but KEEP IT SPOILER-FREE to make people listen to the music with an open mind 💖

✨ Artists and titles will be revealed with the full song after the poll's conclusion, check the original post for an update!

⚠️➡️ Yes, spoilers includes posting the lyrics. Please don't spoil. There are other ways to have fun with the post if you reblog it, maybe be sneaky/witty about it with obscure references. Have fun while following the rules! 😄💖 Fandom blogs/communities are welcome to reblog, but please keep that as far as it goes with spoilers!

everyone on replies is terrified of this fact but i just think it's so sweet and heartwarming. she's holding our hand and leading us somewhere secret and we're both giggling like kids. i love her

let’s travel through the vast unknown with mama

Space chickens

i am going to listen to every single version of route 66 in chronological order to find out who is patient zero for changing "joplin missouri" into "down to/through missouri" but i have a strong suspicion it's the rolling stones

working through this, have made it to 1961. no joplin deletion so far, but i have learned the following things:

will have more reports as research continues. once i've listened to everything i'm going to develop a route 66 lyrics classification scheme to delineate the different lyric variations. i don't fuck around!!!

🚨🚨🚨 ROLLING STONES CONFIRMED AS THE ORIGINAL JOPLIN DELETIONISTS 🚨🚨🚨

their version clearly draws directly from chuck berry's version, but with the crucial change of "joplin, missouri" to "down to missouri". they were immediately followed by countless versions directly based on theirs which perpetuate the joplin erasure*. additionally (and this is mostly probably not the stones' fault) subsequent versions go through a hilarious game of telephone with people trying to pronounce names that were originally "Winona, Kingman, Barstow, San Bernardino" until it becomes an incomprehensible mush. looking forward to other new developments as i press on

*"the joplin erasure" is a lesser-known robert ludlum novel

the reason you, a white american, believe that white americans don't have culture is the same reason fish don't believe in water

yes i know you think it's an antiracist statement, that you're saying it's a bad thing white americans don't have culture. but what you're actually saying is that the way white americans live is simply the normal way to live and that "culture" refers only to deviations from that norm

there's real holidays and then there's, you know, cultural holidays. there's regular foods and there's ethnic foods

this is not (just) about "cultural christianity," an idea that gestures at a real thing but the way tumblr talks about it is mostly not useful, i'm talking about stuff much broader than that.

making yourself a ham sandwich with mayo on white bread is a cultural practice just as much as making jollof rice is a cultural practice.

if you feel some kind of yearning as a white american to connect with your Ancestral Culture you can get really into wearing lederhosen or playing bagpipes or whatever. but you could also just learn to understand the way you are living right now as a culture and not some kind of neutral default absence of culture