Pigeon
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User ID: 237
Whereas if the Politburo demands good literature you can hand them a pamphlet denouncing the latest object of the Politburo's denunciation and even if it's quite bad by what standard, the Politburo isn't a literature department, and even if it's obviously bad can they condemn a condemnation of the thing they wanted condemned?
Not related, but reminds me of a recent Chinese commentary in some newspaper that slobbered praise all over Xi Jinping, comparing him to Mao and Deng — it got pulled very quickly, and the suspected reason for the censorship was that Xi considered himself an equal to Mao only, and superior to Deng.
I believe you misunderstand.
The Kievan Rus' (or Kyivan Rus', I guess, now) is the first East Slav state founded in the 9th century, and the histories of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus start from this point (East Slavs having had no language prior to this point). This state was literally dominated by Kiev during its inception. The names of both Russia and Belarus are etymologically derived after this medieval state, and all three East Slavic nations claim descent from it. Ukraine is literally where Russian civilisation starts*.
Taiwan, on the other hand, is first settled by Austronesians and was relatively untouched by the mainland; the first real attempts at settlement beyond that actually came under the Dutch (who encouraged Han migration over to the island), then the portion of Ming remnants led by Zheng Chenggong who founded the Kingdom of Tungning, until its conquest by the Qing. Taiwan's prehistory lasts well into late Chinese imperial history, it was first properly settled under a European banner, and up until the Japanese invasion it remained a pretty marginal borderland — nobody would think much about it if there wasn't another straggler "Chinese" government trying to set up shop there!
A more analogous comparison to Russia and Ukraine, for (a state of) China, would be if it no longer controlled large swathes its cradle of civilisation — if it "lost" parts of the North China Plain including Anyang and Luoyang, say. Maybe consider an alternate timeline where the Ming somehow doesn't reconquer the North China Plain and the Northern Yuan end up setting shop there indefinitely, or the Southern Song don't fall to the Yuan and no Han-dominated state ever is able to claw back land above the Huai river, or the Northern and Southern Dynasties doesn't end with the Sui, or the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms permanently entrenched a north-south split, and now a modern alt-Chinese government based in the south, claiming descent from those alt-dynasties, is engaging in a little taste of revanchism some few centuries late by appealing to how northerners and southerners are actually one people and should be ruled together.
Edit: better examples. None of those really match exactly; Moscow actually came into prominence during/after the Mongols, so an even better example would be if somehow the Yuan got pushed into a rump Southern state and centuries later the descendant states of the Southern Yuan decide to march back up, but this is a bit too ludicrous
*also where Ukrainian and Belaroussian history starts — I am not making a case that Kyiv is especially Russian, or that Russia has a good case for invading Ukraine
Pigeon
coo coo
3d ago
The only thing I've heard of regarding artificial sweeteners that I thought had enough evidence to be potentially concerned about was potential changes in gut microbiota, but since I don't drink any artificially sweetened drinks I kind of stopped following the news for this.
Maybe I should make a habit of replacing the little amount of sweetened drinks I do have with stevia-replaced ones....
Unfortunately I haven't actually visited mainland China for years now, so it's a bit difficult for me to suss out the temperature re: trans issues within the PRC.
The people I do know in the diaspora are some mix of trying to not touch it with a barge pole, confused, trying to live-and-let-live, and horrified at how the West is gleefully egging on their own mini cultural revolution. (Or they are "bananas" that range from disinterested to doctrinaire progressives)
When it comes to LGB sans T, it's a bit more complicated — China historically did not have strong taboos against homosexuality as long as people still performed their filial duty of having descendants — 不孝有三無後為大 after all — and IIRC the current sort of homosexual taboo is actually mostly a Western import.
I think "confucian values emphasizing traditional family roles, collectivism prioritizing social stability over individual expression, and skepticism of Western ideologies seen as culturally disruptive" is probably way too reductive, but I'm currently travelling and don't really have the time to dedicate thought to this
Pigeon
coo coo
6d ago
Discounting movies, Baccano! comes to mind first.
I think I shilled Dennou Coil in a previous thread; it's an interesting take on virtual reality and the concept of identity/reality in a digital world that's somehow also a children's series. Psycho-Pass, of course, is another series that is similarly tightly constructed.
Other ones with similarly tight plots are…Sora yori mo Tooi Basho, Shigatsu wa Kimi no Uso? Cross Game is less tight, being a sports show spread over 4 cours, but I thought it was well paced. Steins;Gate is a similar sort of series where it's constructed as a full package, but I never found it as compelling as many others.
For ones I have not watched but have heard a reputation for, Fullmetal Alchemist (the reboot) (though I have read the manga), Yojouhan Shinwa Taikei? I've heard Odd Taxi is pretty tight as well. Pluto I think would fit but I am saving that for a rainy day
Pigeon
coo coo
7d ago
There is an argument that a man wearing a dress for Halloween is doing something sexualised; he's just doing a sexualised thing as a joke rather than as an integral part of his identity.
Pigeon
coo coo
7d ago
the very first scene of Madoka running through a surreal hallway and emerging into an apocalyptic cityscape where Homura is fighting an eldritch abomination while "Magia" plays in the background
I forgot that the opening was clever like this.
Pigeon
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8d ago
Then he became an incredibly successful and popular writer and moved to San Francisco where he now lives with his wife, children and mistress.
Wait, mistress?
Pigeon
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8d ago
Season 2 was such a waste of what could be a more Tsunemori-centric sequel. Even
I actually really liked the idea of
Pigeon
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9d ago
Has anybody played Dustborn? Does it live up to the hype (of how bad it is)?
Pigeon
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9d ago
Madoka Magica is just quite neat and well-constructed, twists aside. It’s made as a complete package in a way movies are supposed to be, and that many shows aren’t.
Pigeon
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10d ago
I actually think that it was probably a bit inaccurate and it might have overestimated my spatial/nonverbal IQ (as I thought the spatial elements could be gamed a bit too easily), but most of the soul-searching is due to being quite perplexed at my lower verbal score. Previous estimations/tests of my verbal IQ returned a score, like, >10 points above my nonverbal IQ.
Pigeon
coo coo
10d ago
English is my second language but I did start learning it very early, and often it feels more like a co-first language for me, so it still feels a bit off. I'm wondering if the poor ability in matching letters is due to spending quite a lot of time with logographic scripts as well esp. early on in life, so maybe on some level I treat words in alphabetical languages like independent glyphs?
I think the test-makers are a bit too optimistic if they think more time wouldn't help with the shape rotation portion; a monkey could do it given enough time and if it discovers a reliable method.
The CP puzzles were the
Did it while a little distracted, went away to shower and do other things, did try to concentrate for the timed tasks, also I took this near midnight so might be a little sleepy
- Full scale: 140
- Memory: 138 (VM 76/85, EM 21/26)
- Verbal: 135 (V 30/34, A 16/27)
- Spatial: 141 (MR 17/17, CP 14/18)
I'm surprised my memory and spatial is that high, and that my verbal is that low — historically formal IQ tests have pinned me as having significantly higher verbal IQ. I will blame it on English being a second language of mine (even if I am fluent), but I'm not sure it explains the disparity between the
Probably could've gotten a bit higher on the CP puzzles if I didn't rush and actually reasoned my way through some of these but then I suppose it's fairly pointless if you actually idk do it? Was I supposed to run purely on intuition on this?
Accordingly all Chinese-speaking people I've talked to about it swear up and down that R1 is profoundly poetic and unlike anything else they've seen in its native tongue, they almost cry from how well it weaves together some classical Chinese literature and aphorisms and whatnot.
I can attest to this.
One of the first things I did with DeepSeek, knowing that it was a Chinese model, was to prompt it for a poem about pigeons, written in the style of Du Fu, as a joke. It surprised me, replying with a polished, if not very inspired, poem that obeyed not only general conventions about rhyme, meter, and parallelism; it even rhymed in a way that isn't natural for mandarin, but would have been in Middle Chinese (情 and 聲)! I've since then kept on prompting it occasionally with increasingly bizarre and unhinged requests for Chinese poetry in various forms, including:
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Improving a silly poem about a lonely cat, which it did reasonably well
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A recontextualisation of two of Martial's epigrams (5.34, 10.61)
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Two poems about a fat pigeon
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A poem recasting Lu You's pet cat as a pigeon
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Two unhinged poems about "carnivorous pigeons benching 80kg"
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Another unhinged poem about "pigeons in pink suits eating penguins while pretending to be fish" (suitably for such an insane prompt it took wild liberties with metaphors regarding "pink suits", "eating", "pretending", and "fish")
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Rewriting the Ballad of Mulan with a pigeon in place of Mulan
(please don't wonder too much about why I make a habit of feeding unhinged pigeon prompts to be made into Classical Chinese poetry, I just find it very funny)
All of them have been have something of beauty in their construction, even if they are a bit basic, and some have surprising bite. (The two fat pigeon poems were variously interpreted as a metaphor for decadence and over-abundance being a sort of gilded cage, and a more nostalgic/regretful look at previous glory respectively, for example.) I certainly couldn't write poetry of the same quality, at least not without extensive dedicated study.
And I find the surprising poetic knack to almost be less impressive than its general responses, where it effortlessly weaves together literary allusions updated with context and modern words together in sentences that wouldn't be out of place if it was a planned speech written by Chinese speakers much more erudite than myself, complete with references to classical texts when appropriate — this is especially true if you try to engage it with prettier language or some pretension towards the classical language. (If you write to it in very conversational Chinese, I find that it will reply back in that same register but with a more official phraseology.) The explanatory notes in the pastebin are illustrative of this elegant colloquial Chinese *(and I have to note that this is already rather on the colloquial and vulgar side for DeepSeek commenting on poetry; it can do much better). I wouldn't be overly surprised if at some point in the near future, speeches from the CCP (esp. from lower rank functionaries) suddenly improve significantly in lyricism and style from people prompting DeepSeek or some similar AI; for what it is worth, IIRC Taiwan's official communications often hew somewhat closer to classical language (though it will still be modern), so it may be less of a shift there.
Are there bits and pieces where there could be improvements? Yes, of course. I've caught it making mistakes occasionally in rhyme, and some of the metaphors/plot in the poetry (as well as some of the phraseology in the poetry) can be improved. The poem above is a bit disjointed with the last phrase being a bit odd; I've found some occasional misunderstandings of rhyme between some characters; one time I tried to get it to parse a passage in an old Chinese agricultural encyclopedia (齊民要術) and found that it misunderstood a character. But these are mistakes that could also be made by a person, and in general I would eat my left nut to be as good as DeepSeek is in the context of Classical Chinese.
(Though I might be a chump and not realise that it's been feeding me shit poetry this whole time since I'm not actually good at Classical Chinese)
I've also tried prompting DeepSeek with requests for original 和歌 (without even using bizarre prompts), and it is much, much worse at this than it is at 絕句 or 律詩 or whatever Chinese poetic form — it often can't even keep the number of syllables straight! So it does seem to be mostly trained on Chinese data, which might naturally corrupt Japanese output when it's as finicky as poetry, especially when many of the logographic glyphs used are shared but have different phonetic content in different languages. I wonder what would happen if you tried prompting it for poetry in other (non-Sinosphere, non-English) languages.
Pigeon
coo coo
20d ago
Great Leader Donald Ieyasu Trump
That should be Iemitsu if you are looking for whoever enacted sakkoku.
Pigeon
coo coo
20d ago
Pigeon
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20d ago
One of the schism mods wrote something about being part of a Quaker team at some leftist protest that was a really interesting read, I'll see if I can find it. IIRC it was the "death to terfs" contingent that made her notice something was off.
If you can find it I’d be interested.
Pigeon
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22d ago
So what exactly was the choice given to Poland when Germany and the USSR decided to carve it up?
Pigeon
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25d ago
Mostly the combat system? I think Engage has one of the most robust combat systems in FE history.
I might be wrong, but my understanding of Venus colonisation is actually to terraform it enough so that it’s possible to live high up in the atmosphere rather than on the hellish surface.
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