Bethany Needham

🌂🌂🌂

[Bethany Needham @BKBethanyKate]

@herbieblunt The mother immediately pointing out that she herself is tall and skinny. No wonder the kid is fucked up.

[Bethany Needham @BKBethanyKate]

@ChloeNumberIII bra

[Bethany Needham @BKBethanyKate]

@MassJumbo Columbus, OH and LA - number 15 and number 2

[Bethany Needham @BKBethanyKate]

@KatieGoldin shirmp

[Katie Chiou @katiewav]

the twitch "name 100 women" challenge as a web game

as of now the fastest time is 6min, the slowest time is 90min

GLHF

https://t.co/QVqamSP6hY

[Bethany Needham @BKBethanyKate]

@itsevidentvery I love the part where he added words to Hamlet for his version of the movie

[Bethany Needham @BKBethanyKate]

As a Northerner who went to college in the South, I also want to add that these guys are just plain fun. They aren’t looking to grind or be the next big thing or make $300M a year - they just want to live fun, comfortable lives full of friends and parties with a low stress job.

[Gene Parmesan @dsonoiki]

people online have zero clue what’s going on here

9 times out of 10, the guy’s name is like Chip Walker IV, he’s vaguely related to the Bushes, and you can’t buy a Toyota in the tri-state area unless it’s from one of his dad’s dealerships

it’s a partial invalidation of redpill / manosphere content bc usually the guy isn’t traditionally attractive (gained 30 pounds freshman year, has a beer belly from being a frat star, etc.)

but it’s not a total invalidation because ultimately the guy’s family is loaded

(also yes these guys tend to be nice and fun and gregarious and kind and good friends too)

also, people on X are so used to people with money looking like finance guys (suit and tie, Patrick Bateman, NYC) or tech bros (hoodie, etc.) that they don’t realize these SEC guys are often from loaded old southern money families

[Bethany Needham @BKBethanyKate]

@CallunaVulgaria @buggirl In many states, you can sue for 3x the tree’s value, and the value of old trees is HIGH, so if a shitty neighbor cuts down a tree on your property, you can force the neighbor to pay you back like $30,000. The karmic retribution is excellent.

[Bethany Needham @BKBethanyKate]

@figsaydaa Someone on here said they’re calling it “cit-cod” (rhymes with sitcom) and I like the feel of that better than ccod!

[Bethany Needham @BKBethanyKate]

@rejectedjokes So sad you’re not coming back to Columbus this year!!

[Bethany Needham @BKBethanyKate]

@apr1lf00lz Okay but to the tune of Robyn’s Dancing on My Own

[Bethany Needham @BKBethanyKate]

@aadityad9 @blade_funner I once was at a fundraiser for a children’s hospice organization and they shared a story about how a family had a kid who had a rare genetic disorder and died and then they had a second who died and then a third who died and all I could think of was this tweet…

[Bethany Needham @BKBethanyKate]

@Jesse_Brenneman RUG SOURCE online. Two filters - one for 100% hand wool and one for hand-knotted.

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

This strange square 👇 is undoubtedly the most extraordinary work of literature in human history. Yet, unfortunately, barely anyone in the West has ever heard of it.

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，
��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 (https://t.co/4exP9zpqbc), 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 (https://t.co/yW7aR73MPc).

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.

[Bethany Needham @BKBethanyKate]

@sabanasmilez LE POISSON STEVE!

[Bethany Needham @BKBethanyKate]

@demiurgently Can’t even begin to tell you how many still frozen Uncrustables I ate when my husband was done with his paternity leave.

[Bethany Needham @BKBethanyKate]

@gabrielledrolet Rat dressing up their tiny rat baby for Halloween. Possibly as an acorn.

[Bethany Needham @BKBethanyKate]

@imbobswaget Atacama.

[Bethany Needham @BKBethanyKate]

@PLAYTHEWOMAN @jordynceIeste Bold statement from Jeff when my timeline is filled with those goddamn tiramisu brownies.

[Bethany Needham @BKBethanyKate]

@dreamskyrivera Or worse - hearing a new song on the radio and immediately categorizing it as a glee song