There's Something Unique About Aztec Images ❤ They Are Full Of Life Yet Schematic And Precise, I Want

Dagashi Kashi is great because it's abt someone infodumping about their special interest and how awesome that is

Always be sus of ideas that confuse the value of art with technical skill, talent, or hard work. There's a reason people used to think of it as 'divine inspiration' -- artistic success, is mysterious, arbitrary, and about getting possessed by supernatural organisms

I wonder if 'drug user' was an unnecessarily technical-sounding translation of, like, 'addict' or something. "She had so many drugs, like an addict" is a sentence with good flow

She had so many drugs... like a drug user.

It's a probably a distortion based on whoever stopped sending Zheng He

*Looks up* the Hongxi and Xuande emperors.

Totally a wrong narrative, really it was admirable that these emperors didn't want to go down the overseas colonization path + they never closed off the country

a while ago i heard someone say “it’s crazy to think that china used to be a world superpower, and then one of their emperors decided he hated all foreigners and completely closed the country off, and they’ve never recovered since. imagine what they could have been if not for that one man’s decision” and the thing that drives me nuts is i know a lot of chinese history and i cannot for the life of me think who this might be about

so that I don't forget

THE LESSON OF WUTHERING HEIGHTS, OF GREEK TRAGEDY, AND ULTIMATELY, OF ALL RELIGIONS, IS THAT THERE IS AN INSTINCTIVE TENDENCY TOWARDS DIVINE INTOXICATION WHICH THE RATIONAL WORLD OF CALCULATION CANNOT BEAR.* IF YOURE LISTENING!! IF YOU EVEN CARE!!!!

*Georges Bataille, Literature and Evil

What I love about Akudama Drive so far is how it makes you totally enthralled with Cutthroat and full of contempt for the Kansai pd in a way that's not just/not *exactly* political. It's not that I hate Kansai pd because they're perpetrating injustice (although I'm sure they are.) I hate them because there's something pathetic and embarrassing about their attempts to enforce order at all. Even if they really were protecting innocent people from dangerous criminals, there's still something shameful about how they think they can end peoples' lives for 'justified' reasons... even if those reasons truly are justified by every ethical system that exists. Just look at how grotesquely their leader behaves --- that's their soul. They will always be flailing around in futility and an endless mess... in a way that's beyond all political definitions of oppression. This show is truly intoxicating.

Ofc Wikipedia is what it is but this line has a really important clue as to why it happened

So this suggests that the Aksumites were identifying themselves with the exonym of the land they conquered.

This claim is cited to the book Aksum and Nubia: Warfare, Commerce, and Political Fictions in Ancient Northeast Africa

so "ethiopia" as a term is originally greek, and i'm having a weird amount of trouble telling when the land now called ethiopia started calling itself that. from the discussion here and some wikipedia reading, the 13th century is the first recorded instance, but it's probably older than that. definitely *after* the 4th century, because the axumites and the ethiopians are distinct groups. its weird because ethiopia was originally the exonym, but then abyssinia became the preferred exonym, and at some point ethiopia became the endonym. which is kind of weird, i dont think it's that common that a distant exonym becomes your endonym

by Hiroshige III (a student of the more famous Hiroshige).

It's extra Dai-Nippon Gothich because it's an ad for a circus performing on the grounds of the Yasukuni shrine.

You can trace an ideological lineage from Tezuka to Miyazaki, where both promote a kind of 'pacifism' which is at its core conservative and hostile to the idea of fighting against real evil. Thinking specifically of Tezuka's "Buddha" series here

My hot take is that I feel like “ghibli films are pro Japanese imperialism” is a lazy jab that grabs at a few soft spots in the oeuvre to make the cheapest most rhetorically damaging shot it can, and that an honest analysis would generally struggle to say even the most problematic of the movies like The Wind Rises come out of the wash with a positive opinion of imperial Japan. My hotter take is that if you rigorously pull at the threads where the nominally anti-war films thematically collapse, you’ll find the issue isn’t a support of Japanese Imperialism but a lack of a rigorous critique of industrial civilization.

not to be annoying but its really funny watching people in an rpg maker discord argue against ai from the point of view of "hard work and labor is what making games is all about, if you don't put in the effort you don't deserve a game". ok. why are you using rpg maker then.