there's someone on Wikipedia who writes articles about Cantonese opera but constantly names paragraphs after generic figures of speech. For example, they titled a paragraph about the economic threats facing the opera as "All for Naught."
Here's an example from the article on the actor Yam Kim-fai (who is really good, btw):
I wonder if this is translated from Cantonese... maybe the original sounded very poetic
According to the article I read, it was considered a status symbol among them to not know how to perform basic tasks due to reliance on servants. It's a fascinating contrast from the kind of values we have today, isn't it? I got the impression that their ideal of the most noble life was not merely leisure, but perfect stasis like a marine invertebrate that sticks to rocks forever.
Maybe we'd all see things that way if we never had to work
公
侯
伯
子
男
Ten Sho, Sho Ten Sho
Solar System
the thing I actually hate abt AI art is not that it has no creative intent behind it (that's not necessary for art imo) or that it trains on ppls stuff (I don't like intellectual property) but that it has a tendency to homogenize everything and present us with what we already expect, reinforce really stupid stereotypes etc. This can be illustrated with how in Minecraft AI it never lets you get to an interesting new world like the Nether and always takes you back to the familiar overworld
If only there was a technology that wasn't predictive, but actively hostile and gave us the opposite of what we expected...
There is so much CONTENT in the world! We can't eat it all easily... It's amazing!
if a morpho butterfly was a person
Mana Sama 「Merveilles」
this implies that the redditor in question thinks only the Bach-style wigs are stupid and the Mozart-style wigs are actually cool
later i saw a post on reddit that said “the difference between baroque and classical music is whether it was composed by someone wearing a stupid wig”
I'd interpret this as: Ancient Greek aesthetic values still retain such a hold on our culture that we feel like Ancient Greek writing is good whereas the Hebrew Bible doesn't appear well written
(That being said, there are also aspects of Greek aesthetics that feel foreign to us)
so i'd read that the greek intellectual sphere had a pretty negative reaction to the *style* of the bible, when compared to the greek traditional religious works (i mean. obviously homer is not like the bible. but it is the closest approximation), which i assumed was some subtle poeticness i couldnt get without speaking ancient greek. but after listening to the odyssey, it makes a lot more sense. the odyssey is like...well written! its a good work of literature! and the bible just isn't that, at all. the bible is not that kind of work. obviously there are good *lines* in the bible. but at most there are good paragraphs. there are no good pages of the bible, where the whole thing is well written. its really like, 95% clunky. so if im an ancient greek, and im used to like, homer and hesiod, and then these guys come around touting their holy texts, and it poorly written, i would find it a pretty tough sell!
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