🌘 Lysander 🌒

• error404 pronouns not found
• ftm nonbinary depressed mess
• videogames, books
• larp, festivals
• tattoos, piercings n colorful hair
| i swear im an adult |

[🌘 Lysander 🌒 @vivid_moth]

#TransDayOfVisibility
I'm a trans masc enby dude.
Even if I'm looking female-ish, my primary sexual organs may be female,my voice sounds more feminin,my clothes are gender conforming or my pass says female.
I decide what I am, how I feel & how you can speak with me.
Nobody else.

[🔪 American McGee 🖤 @americanmcgee]

I left Shanghai for a few days to focus on writing - creating another* fairytale based on Plushie Dreadfuls and one of my kids. The view from my "office" this morning - the bamboo forests and mountains of Anji.

And I have to say - again - that internal tourism in China is just *next level* these days. You can throw a dart at a map and you'll find wonderful scenery, beautiful architecture, and awesome food.

*Yes, another. I have one story based on "Princess Leeloo" done now. In illustrated book format. ~70 pages. Perfect for reading to kids. And it's a cute story about what happens when we bottle up our emotions.

[ToonHive @ToonHive]

Official poster for ‘The Lovers’ made by ‘KPop Demon Hunters’ character designer Ami Thompson (@AmiThompson_h).

The film will premiere on YouTube this summer.

(Support: https://t.co/KGpbuvXKeQ)

[🪬 Caleb 🪬 @sethpuertoluna]

A Drop In The Ocean

[Mapocolops @Mapocolops]

Disappointed in EA? Love the Alice series? Here’s an 8.5 hour deep dive into #AmericanMcGee’s Alice Otherlands and #AliceAsylum. I went through the Otherlands animated series and art book + the full design bible for Asylum, voicing the full narrative. 🔪❤️
https://t.co/CjlX33BPmA

[Art Encyclopedia @artenpedia]

‘The Angel of Power’ by Anelia Pavlova

[WikiVictorian @wikivictorian]

'A Showgirl touches up her lipstick backstage, Paris.' Photographed in 1926.

[🪬 Caleb 🪬 @sethpuertoluna]

The Poisoner Who Loved A Fisherwoman

[전골(hp)🍉 @bewitchedblood0]

얀 홀더 모로스(죄송합니다)

[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，
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 (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.

[bunny ✤ @oakfrogs]

did you know: you can turn your phone into a medieval manuscript

[伊藤暢達/Masahiro Ito @adsk4]

Leave twitter world, then draw a fictional world in the real world.

[yvo 🩸@ AX p20 @yvotoro]

sticker sheet :o)

[WikiVictorian @wikivictorian]

‘Aunty Mary and her “friend” Ruth'. Photographed in 1910.

[WikiVictorian @wikivictorian]

'Wedding between female lovers'. Photographed in the 1900s.

[positivity moon @arrtnem]

Someone always asks it like a joke.
“Why don’t women get addicted to gambling?” said with that half smirk, like women are too sensible, too boring, too busy knitting and paying bills while men ruin their lives at poker tables.

The real answer is ugly and simple: who told you they do not.

You just see male addiction more because his fall is allowed to be public. He gets the smoky casino, the dramatic all in, the story at 3:00 about how he lost the house. A woman is more likely to be losing in silence on her phone in the kitchen while the pasta water boils over. Same nervous system, different socially acceptable scenery.

Picture her at 22:47, kids finally asleep, sink still full because there is always one more dish. She sits down “just for a second”, opens that bright slot app on her phone. It does not say casino. It says something like Lucky Farm or Star Paradise so it feels childish, harmless. She spins. Four dollars. Seven. Twelve. The dopamine hits the same way it would in Vegas. Her heart does the same little jump when almost all the cherries line up. No cigarette smoke, no neon, just fridge hum and the sound of the washer in the next room. Still gambling.

Or she is in a supermarket at 11:32 on a Wednesday, buying the boring list. Milk. Bread. Laundry detergent that never goes on sale. At the checkout she adds three scratch cards “for fun.” The cashier does not blink. A mom with a cart and scratchers is invisible. She will scratch them later in the car, key pressed between her teeth, crumbs of silver dust on her black jeans. For a moment her life is not coupons and appointments. It is possibility. Then it is nothing again. She crumples the slips, drives home, tells no one.

The addiction is not missing. It is disguised as something cute or practical or feminine.
“Girls trip to bingo.”
“Grandma loves the lottery.”
“Mom just likes her little games.”

Men are allowed to have vices. Women are supposed to have quirks.

People think gambling is only about chips and cards. Women are taught to gamble with different currency. A lot of them learn early how to bet their body, their safety, their whole future on a guy who “just needs support.” That is a slot machine too. You pull the handle every time you forgive. Maybe this time he will change. Maybe this time he will really mean it. Your heart spins like reels, and you keep feeding in years.

Why would she need blackjack when she has a relationship that pays out once every ten arguments.

Ask the girl who keeps refreshing her banking app at 03:12 because she moved money from the rent to an “investment” her boyfriend swore would work if she just trusted him. Ask the woman who married into someone else’s chaos and is now betting her credit score on his business. She might never have touched a poker table in her life. She is still addicted to risk, just socially approved risk. The kind that gets called loyalty.

NO, it is not that women do not get addicted. It is that their addictions are easier to applaud.

Be thin. But not too thin. Eat. But do not enjoy it. Spend on your looks. But never admit how much. That is gambling too. Every diet is a roulette of health. Every “just one more round of fillers” is a bet that your face will translate as youth instead of desperation. Nobody calls that addiction. They call it discipline, self care, staying competitive. Entire industries sit on top of that female urge to feel like they have one more chance to fix themselves.

If a guy spends three nights a week in a casino, his friends say he has a problem.
If a woman spends three nights a week alone with her phone, spinning digital slots while everyone thinks she is scrolling Pinterest, people say she is tired. Or “mom deserves her wine and her silly games.” The problem does not ring loud enough to be named.

[Enchanted Booklet @dreamerbook]

'The Dreamer' by Edmund Dulac, 1915.

[The Golden Age @thegoldenaged]

"The Day I Bought a Star" is a side story from Howl's Moving Castle.
Ninya and Nona were witches and are related to Howl in the later wastelands ❤️

[Anaïs @MorriganReading]

Everyone wants Guillermo Del Toro to adapt PotO but I have a different request

[RIN @Rin_Vixen]

To all the men harassing me for being trans:

Go to North Shore hospital in NSW Aus.
Take a left as you enter the lobby and go to the fertility labs. Once there head to the right and open cold storage. Find container 312, open it, and lick my fucking preserved popsicled balls ✌🏻