Devotion The Poets' Camp Prince Consort Xue Shao: [Y]our Mother (Empress Wu Below) Killed Her To Fulfill
![Devotion The Poets' Camp Prince Consort Xue Shao: [Y]our Mother (Empress Wu Below) Killed Her To Fulfill](https://64.media.tumblr.com/4555379395fd9532287a91fa91eb70fd/tumblr_nz0arsS8w81v0w9ujo1_500.png)
Devotion The Poets' Camp Prince Consort Xue Shao: [Y]our mother (Empress Wu below) killed her to fulfill the romantic fantasy you conjured on a whim!
View On WordPress
More Posts from Aphilosopherchair and Others
Read this whole article about mushroom mavens of the Victorian Era, it is delightful.
"[Banning] published some of her observations in botanical journals, including lively accounts of her foraging experiences. In one, she recounts bringing home a few (aptly named) stinkhorn mushrooms: “… there was an outcry through the house, one enquiring of the other what the loathsome smell could be, and where it came from. Each moment was filled with anxiety, lest my precious fungus, for which I had already endured so much, might be seized and carried off … .” Indeed, the stink comes from the gooey mass of fungal spores on top of the mushroom cap. She astutely proposed that the stench lures in flies and other insects, which then transport the spores afar like a bee transports pollen." "[Banning] published some of her observations in botanical journals, including lively accounts of her foraging experiences. In one, she recounts bringing home a few (aptly named) stinkhorn mushrooms: “… there was an outcry through the house, one enquiring of the other what the loathsome smell could be, and where it came from. Each moment was filled with anxiety, lest my precious fungus, for which I had already endured so much, might be seized and carried off … .” Indeed, the stink comes from the gooey mass of fungal spores on top of the mushroom cap. She astutely proposed that the stench lures in flies and other insects, which then transport the spores afar like a bee transports pollen."
Full Article on JStor Daily Here
Familiar Question
Does one of the challenges from @overchers ring a bell?
Mystical Quintet
Rock art, remarked philosopher Thomas Heyd, transforms land into landscape by imbuing it with cultural meanings. When someone looks at an old inuksuk, as Arctic researcher Norman Hallenday similarly opined, he is seeing more than a pile of stones—what enter his gaze are also the thoughts of another human being. And depending on how the viewer further engages with the stone structure, he adds new…
View On WordPress
Oh, WOW,
the number of poll responses has been greater than expected. Five people, excluding the soapbender, voted yes, so here it goes. The hilarious chase that would deliver the checkmate is detailed in the comments to the attached article. Make sure to credit the soapbending variance authority in the requested manner if you want to share the solution.
In the meantime, we cross our fingers in the ongoing, live championship. A decisive game looks set for today (so far).
[Hey, That’s Her] The Riemann Sphere is Her Mirror on the Wall
MBC 드라마 《신입사관 구해령》 (2019)
There may be such a woman.
For at least eleven hours a day, her analytical, artistic, emotional and ethical minds are collectively locked up in a Taylorist cell block where the mantra is familiarly simple: Don’t question, don’t tell. Every reasonable client is aware that this is a dog-eat-dog world, so it is up to him or her to look out for personal interests not yet covered by contract law or even fiduciary law. If you value your principles and dreams over your corporation’s needs, you are a selfish hypocrite. Oh, and complain all you want at the water cooler; just remember to put back your angel mask and keep your head low at meetings.
That much is not really astonishing. No one in this place is a one-day-old. What stuns more is the utterly dim calaboose she toils away at her daytime lockup to return her body to every night, where broken bottles and suspicious pools of liquids bedeck the streets, literal rock concerts never cease, homeless druggies openly spread their limp bodies on pavements, and drunken Cinderellas and Cinderfellas bang on random doors when the clock strikes twelve.
Change might come with time but, given a burgeoning workload and an increasingly creepy cardiac rhythm, it must come soon. So, one night, she decides that if all jobs are this suffocating, she might as well take the best-paid one. It’s time to head back to graduate school, except that, this time, economic logic shall prevail over passion and intrigue.
As part of her research on Wealth and Investment Management MScs, she hunts down sample class videos from different business schools. Nestled among the suggested clips accompanying one search result, though, is a familiarly curious title that hypnotizingly whispers to her, Shopaholic Louis-style. It is the name an adviser, frowning over yet another overloaded course plan from her, pressed her into canceling out all those years ago right when meeting times for the semester did not conflict with those of her core classes. And soon, before her eyes, is an entire playlist for her narrowly missed destiny.
What harm could playing the introductory video at 2x do? Business schools’ admissions websites would not vanish in 30 minutes’ time. Ah, that was a collegiate equivalent of a soulful tearjerker but covered mostly basics she learnt in other classes. Application deadlines are half a year away, so there is ample room for a second lecture. Cool! The plot thickened pretty fast. Her college and graduate school debts are still badly in arrears. Can she be certain that she truly understands everything without attempting an unseen problem? Fetch homework sets from the official homepage tomorrow. Had she been bolder in imagination, she would have gotten question 7 right. Try harder for lecture three’s assignments. She has run out of eligible guarantors for a third loan. Lecture 11. Course completed. What a satisfying visual feast! Hey, the blurb of the follow-up course sounds fascinating too. It is not that she does not love investment banking. How about challenging herself at that course while the material of this course is still fresh in her mind? It is that she loathes investment banking. Mathematical logic has trumped economic logic.
How do you hold every number up to infinity in the palm of your hand without a poetic soul? Scoop out a round piece of dough and fancy being able to spread it so thin that it stretches to infinity. But instead of actually spreading it, roll up the edge to form a sphere. Let the bottom tip represent zero and the top tip represent infinity. As a point on the surface moves up from the bottom, it can have components that are each positive or negative, real or imaginary, depending on which pairs of opposite longitudes you assign the real number line and imaginary number line (recall: e.g. …, -10i, -9.99i, … , 0, … , 9.99i, 10i, …, where i is the square root of -1) to. The rise in value of each component accelerates with height, such that the physical gap representing any given numerical difference shrinks infinitely on the surface of the sphere as infinity approaches, making it harder and harder to advance and actually reach infinity. You are now cradling a physical version of the Riemann sphere.
© Jean-Christophe BENOIST, modified under the permission of CC BY-SA 3.0. P(A), around 1.5 in value, on the sphere corresponds to A on the grid, which represents the same numerical system in a typical boundless, regularly spaced 2D format. Similarly, P(B), around -0.5 in value, on the sphere corresponds to B on the grid.
The macrocosm of universal random structures, infinite products, manifolds and many more is a dearly missed oracle that reveals her inadequacies for what they are, without miserliness, patronizing sugar-coating, or, ironically, calculation: her inflexibility, her inattentiveness, her impatience and her indolence. “Shortcuts and cookie-cutter approaches cannot be your default,” it states plainly. So long as they do not cross a certain line, tactful hypocrites, on the whole, seem to be treated better by their surrounding adult peers than sharp-tongued, straight-talking observers with pure intentions in her circle. Yet the more she experiences of the grown-up world, with the heightened stakes and heightened awareness of interpersonal dangers that deter verbalization of contrarian opinions on the one hand and massive clots of intractable ills on the other, the more she wishes to cherish many of those straight talkers. The ideal living beings are, of course, the severely scarce breed who efficiently marry the circumspection, civility and altruistic strategizing that come with tact with the determination to convey, where necessary, uncomfortable truths.
For all its uninhibited criticism, mathematics gives credit where it is due and those who converse with it are frequently safe in the knowledge that it means its flattery. It reassures this corporate internee who feels increasingly stuck in her ways that she still has what it takes to master new grammars and vocabularies. It rewards her finesse at plugging gaps in background knowledge by improvising from scratch techniques taught only in later, simpler courses. What if these skills could let her pivot directly to some sector slightly less lucrative but also less odious to her than investment banking, never mind exactly how competitively relevant her prior higher education and corporate experience are?
Far more certain is that her deliciously madcap approach to this discipline with a matchingly rebellious streak has magically quietened the rock concerts and the intoxicated fairy tales and almost erased the jail bars. Nonetheless, as the faded bars unveil more and more vistas stretching beyond the horizons, she starts to wonder if she will live long enough to look a little further, if she will ever squirrel away enough bucks—after all those deductions for debt payments, taxes, food, rent, basic maintenance and transport—to hike a little closer, and if her wrinkled, financially secure self will continue to have the visual and cognitive acuities to deconstruct or even remember the sights a little longer. The jail bars resolidify to some degree.
Still, if positive infinity and negative infinity have been rendezvousing in a dimension invisible until intrepid mind adventurers outed them, and if functions as diverse as trigonometric functions, inverse polynomials and logarithmic functions share the same class of undercover identities, i.e. infinite sums of terms with increasing powers, maybe, she thinks, escape hatches exist somewhere nearby after all.
There may be such a woman. There may be such a snowless ending by a grilled window.
Note: This work of fiction commemorating Pi Day was inspired by an old Dramabeans guest post campaign, a few heartfelt entries of which have appeared in the admin’s Twitter feed. There is no intention, however, to establish any kind of association with the site. Interested readers can find slightly similar math-life themes in the book versions of Kim Ji-young, Born 1982 (82년생 김지영) and The Devotion of Suspect X (容疑者Xの献身).
The NI Series (3): Madame Breakup Is Not Quite a Phantom!
Admin’s Message: After a long break, the noble idiocy trope is put under the microscope again! In this third installment, Vietnamese Canadian Mawiie, a drama reviewer who has also delighted K-drama fans with her clay figurines of popular characters, enthusiastically shares with us how her background has shaped her reaction to variants of the trope involving characters’ closest tribe members.
I need to start off by saying that my opinion comes from a second-generation Vietnamese Canadian who grew up with very liberal parents, but extremely conservative grandparents.
As a child, my grandparents (with whom I spent a lot of time - my grandpa was the one in charge for my education) would constantly talk about filial piety. They were expecting me to get high-paying jobs so I would be providing for them AND my parents. I was the eldest sibling, and also the most motivated for school, so they had extremely high expectations for me to help the whole family out.
So coming from my own experience, when I see family-related noble idiocy issues on the screen, I can believe that they are realistic, especially in a country like Korea where Confucianism is still highly valued, But I also think that, like 0kuo0 has said, the issues have been highly exaggerated in some dramas. I am mostly thinking about those crazy dailies. Are they rooted in some truth? I don't doubt it one bit. But are they always resolved with Niagara Falls level of tears and major life-altering decision sending one character over the Pacific? I sure hope not.
Now, like I have said, while my grandparents were very conservative (”How dare you take a job as a college student? That means that you will quit school! You have to forego a social life and your personal needs for money so you can study to be a doctor and buy us a house where we will ALL live together!"), my parents were pretty cool. I got to do what I wanted, as long as it was reasonable, but my parents would still bend to all the demands of my grandparents.
It was really weird and frustrating to see my parents tell me one thing, but not dare to do it themselves. So I always get super frustrated at characters in drama who can't stand up for themselves when they did no wrong!
TLDR: Growing up with conservative grandparents, I recognize many of the examples in k-dramas. I think that for most part, it's pretty accurate with some exaggeration in dailies. On the other hand, in the West, the Confucian way of thinking kinda decreases with new generations, so while I understand why the characters are acting the way they are, I can't get over the fact that OMG YOU ARE A GROWN ASS MAN/WOMAN, JUST TALK TO EACH OTHER AND DON'T LET YOUR MOM RULE YOUR LIFE.
Accounting on Ice
Thirsty for more action-packed accounting shenanigans? Bring your hockey gear to Accounting On Ice, a fantasized ice sports complex celebrating accounting concepts.
Accounting On Ice has three rinks, each with a different theme:
The Balance Sheet Rink is divided into two halves, representing the assets and liabilities sides of a balance sheet. The assets side is blue, and the liabilities side is red.
The Income Statement Rink is divided into four sections, representing the revenue, expenses, gains and losses sections of an income statement. The revenue section is green, the expenses section is yellow, the gains section is blue, and the losses section is orange.
The Statement of Cash Flows Rink is divided into three sections, representing the operating, investing, and financing activities sections of a statement of cash flows. The operating activities section is orange, the investing activities section is brown, and the financing activities section is gray.
Each rink is decorated with icons of different types of accounting items in the rink (e.g. types of assets and liabilities in the case of the Balance Sheet Rink).
Equipment:
Hockey sticks are styled as mouse pointers and USB dongles.
Pucks come with monetary symbols.
Tournaments:
The scoreboard shows the balance sheet of the complex.
Players wear jerseys with the names of different accounting terms.
Players are to skate around the rinks and score goals in the correct section.
The complex hosts tournaments with names like the "FIFO vs. LIFO Cup" and the "Going Concern vs. Liquidation Challenge."
There is a "Tax Time" skating party, where skaters dress up as accountants and compete in a tax-themed relay race.
Other amenities in the complex:
A ticket office named "Ledger"
A concession stand named "Audit" that offers snacks with names like "Debit Donuts" and "Credit Crunch"
A "Hall of Fame" that recognizes people who have made significant contributions to the field of accounting, categorizing them as "athletes," "builders" or "officials" for metaphorical comparison
A museum named "Rule of 72" that exhibits different artifacts from the history of accounting
A library named "Equity" with books and articles about accounting and with accounting formulae quoted like sayings on its walls
A computer lab named "Common Perennial Aches" with accounting software
A conference room named "T-account" for hosting accounting classes, workshops and seminars
A gift shop named "Trial Balance" that sells accounting-themed merchandise
The complex is open to the public and offers a variety of programs and services for people of all ages and skill levels in accounting and ice sports.
All in all, Accounting On Ice is a fabulous place to learn about accounting in an entertaining and interactive manner, to practice your skills, or to just have some fun on the ice. What are Big Four spectators waiting for? Get your bean counters to work on the bidding prices. You know the rule: No peeking at the human editor's estimated sales value.
After a long career passively (but not necessarily bitterly) hosting characters' romantic moments under or in the vicinity of their canopies, what do trees want in their retirement lives?
What if their aged selves will have ideas of romance different from characters' ideas of romance and our expectations of old trees?
What if those with the requisite magical power have only stayed rooted all their lives because they don't want to be fan-less, threatened freaks?
Shrinkflated Reincarnation
ML: This is what I'm saying in the title: shrinkflated reincarnation!
Death: (In Park So-dam's sweet voice) The black math works fine. Let S be soul autonomy measured in fractions of its full possible extent.
S=½+¼+⅛+…, with new terms as good as 0 as the list goes on.
Multiply both sides by 2.
2S=1+½+¼+…=1+S
Subtract S from both sides.
S=1
Lo and behold, you enjoy full soul autonomy, beautifully split over infinite lifetimes in the remake. Next aggrieved soul.
ML: Send me back to my original show!
Warning: Viewers expressed discomfort with the extreme sadism in episode 5 of the original K-drama.
An energy economy intubated, intercepted and interrogated by its multiverse escape game, TikTok-addicted black holes, go-getting cerebral vampires and healing rice ball spirits. Originally an extension of The Asian Drama Philosopher (A-Philosopher)’s Chair, a site examining literature, art and ideas featured in East Asian series.
121 posts