Girl Is Not Beating The Emperor Allegations (⁠ั･⁠﹏⁠ั･⁠ ⁠)

motivational words from the yuan ming dinasty blorbos to brighten your day <3

Just watched Mean Girls!

I wish I were both more like and less Cady. I will not elaborate.

How to be a Disney princess: a Li Xiangyi/Li Lianhua guide

1. Magic hair

2. Magic hands

3. Be poisoned

4. Be kidnapped or enslaved

And the most important one: people must assume all your problems got solved because a big strong man showed up

«ah yeah, it’s him. he is the one”

Nirvana in Fire through the socioeconomic lens

How do you depict social class disparities on a personal level, rather than masses of people with very different means and lives and the unwritten rules that divide them? How do you tell a meaningful story staked on these differences?

There are a lot of reasons why Nirvana in Fire is compelling, one of which is the assured way the narrative knows when to be subtle and when to bring the angst and drama, and its exploration of how identity is deeply entwined with social class is a great example of this.

Historical background

Though NiF is a story with a fictional historical setting/架空, it is still grounded in real history, and the choice of the Northern and Southern Dynasties as a very loose background period is no accident. During this time, the ruling class’s stranglehold on society was especially strong. In canon, you see nobles such as Xie Yu/Marquis Ning and Marquis Huaiyi own large estates and their own private militia, which was very much the situation back then. There were a large number of rebellions and unrests led by these aristocrats during this time, and being Emperor was a delicate balancing act to keep them happy but not let them gain too much power.

This kind of background is what a work of fiction generally wants to avoid directly dumping on the audience as exposition; a good period-setting story should stake its narrative conflicts on its historical basis in a logical manner and make the audience feel the conflict. As an example, the nine-rank selection system/九品中正制, the official selection process in use during the Northern and Southern Dynasties, is exactly what’s being discussed in the scene where Xiao Jingyan brings Shen Zhui and Cai Quan over to Su Manor (and in my opinion a good change from book to screen).

In particular, they’re talking about how to choose the selection officials/中正官 who grade candidates to be selected and ranked into positions of the imperial bureaucracy. Instead of the imperial examinations/科举 that many later dynasties use, this system has these selection officials recommend people to become officials and was instituted to replace the previous system (察举制) which had been fully taken over by the aristocracy. At first, the selection criteria of the nine-rank system were the candidate’s family background, virtue, and talent, but this again became corrupted over time by the ruling class to essentially only depend on background and connections with the selection officials. There was a well-known saying back then: 上品无寒门，下品无士族, which means no commoners in the top ranks, no upper class in the lower ranks.

In canon, corruption of this process is specifically linked to the ex-Crown Prince and Prince Yu’s power struggle, each packing the government full of well-to-do officials sympathetic to their own factions. Shen Zhui lists the factors in the process of choosing selection officials, from family background to houses of marriage and mentors, from which it’s clear that ruling class influence is inextricably tied to this process. They discuss whether to go for bold reforms and possible conflict and bloodshed, or something more incremental, and decide on choosing the least corrupt candidate within the pool of eligibility that would not ruffle feathers, essentially trying their best while staying within the bounds of the system.

This scene is also narratively important as the first Jingsu reunion after Mei Changsu was imprisoned in the Xuanjing Bureau and Jingyan discovered painfully that he had accused him of things he didn’t do. Through the class angle, I think Jingyan interprets Su Manor turning him away when he tried to visit earlier as the way a subject would implicitly slap the hand of their lord by reminding them of their place. If Jingyan has no official business to be at Su Manor, if he is only there to make a personal visit and apologize, then he is not there as Mei Changsu’s lord, but as his friend, which Jingyan has no right to be, any longer. Of course, that’s not the real reason (at least, not the only one), but Jingyan doesn’t know that. With these boundary-enforcing interactions, Jingyan believes Mei Changsu wants to remind him that he had erred precisely because he was too emotionally invested in his relationship with Sir Su instead of thinking logically, that the boundaries are there for a reason and he should maintain them.

So what does he do instead of trying to make more personal visits? He brings Shen Zhui and Cai Quan with him on an official visit from lord to subject, one specifically designed to pave a path forward for Su Zhe’s advancement in government, showing that he knows he was wrong and wants to make amends in a useful way without making an explicit apology, which Mei Changsu neither wants nor needs. Mei Changsu receives them warmly yet professionally in return, showing in turn that he has no qualms about continuing to serve his lord and that the past is past.

All in all, I find this scene a good example of subtle layered storytelling that occurs a lot in NiF: this conversation that is about social class on the surface has its underlying structure and place in the narrative also reflecting class differences. It shows how the feudal hierarchy leads to rampant misconduct in government while also warns of the dangers of venturing too far from the rules that are in place.

Keep reading

It's not so bad (just got back here, will start hating in a few hours)

Assumption: British?

yes (I wish I lived somewhere else, I hate this country)

A lot of people around me are having kids and every day it becomes more apparent that hitting your children to punish them is insane because literally everything can be a horrible punishment in their eyes if you frame it as such.

Like, one family makes their toddler sit on the stairs for three minutes when he hits his brother or whatever. The stairs are well lit and he can see his family the whole time, he’s just not allowed to get up and leave the stairs or the timer starts over. He fucking hates it just because it’s framed as a punishment.

Another family use a baseball cap. It’s just a plain blue cap with nothing on it. When their toddler needs discipline he gets a timeout on a chair and has to put the cap on. When they’re out and about he just has to wear the cap but it gets the same reaction. Nobody around them can tell he’s being punished because it’s in no way an embarrassing cap, but HE knows and just the threat of having to wear it is enough.

And there isn’t the same contempt afterwards I’ve seen with kids whose parents hit them. One time the kid swung a stick at my dog, his mother immediately made him sit on the stairs, he screamed but stayed put, then he came over to my dog and gently said “Sorry Ellie” and went back to playing like nothing happened, but this time without swinging sticks at the nearby animals.

Source

Progress being made in Africa

Duolingo is NOT what it used to be.

Nation.Cymru

Language learning app Duolingo to mothball Welsh course

Emily Price Language learning app Duolingo will mothball its Welsh course at the end of this month meaning it will no longer be edited or up

“Duolingo is ‘sunsetting the development of the Welsh course’ (and many others)”.

I’ve used Duolingo since 2013. It used to be about genuinely learning languages and preserving endangered ones. It used to have a vibrant community and forum where users were listened to. It used to have volunteers that dedicated countless hours and even years to making the best courses they could while also trying to explain extremely nuanced and complex grammar in simple terms.

In the past two years it feels like Von Ahn let the money talk instead of focusing on the original goal.

No one truly had a humongous problem with the subscription tier for SuperDuolingo. We understood it: if you can afford to pay, help keep Duolingo free for those who couldn’t.

It started when the company went public. Volunteers were leaving courses they created because they warned of differing longterm goals compared to Duolingo’s as a company; not long after it was announced that the incubator (how volunteers were able to make courses in the first place) would be shut down. A year goes by and the forums—the voice of the users and the way people were able to share tips and explanations—is discontinued. A year or two later, Duolingo gets a completely new makeover—the Tree is gone and you don’t control what lesson you start with. With the disappearance of the Tree, all grammar notes and explanations for courses not in the Big 8 (consisting of the courses made before the incubator like Spanish/French/German/etc. and of the most popular courses like Japanese/Korean/Chinese/etc.) are removed with it. Were you learning Vietnamese and have no idea how honorifics work without the grammar notes? Shit outta luck bud. Were you learning Polish and have absolutely no clue how one of the declensions newly thrown at you functions? Suck it up. In a Reddit AMA, Von Ahn claims that the new design resulted in more users utilizing the app/site. How he claims that statistic? By counting how many people log into their Duolingo account, as if an entire app renovation wouldn’t cause an uptick in numbers to even see what the fuck just happened to the courses.

Von Ahn announces next in a Reddit AMA that no more language courses will be added from what there already is available. His reasoning? No one uses the unpopular language courses — along with how Duolingo will now be doing upkeep with the courses already in place. And here I am, currently looking on the Duolingo website how there are 1.8 million active learners for Irish, 284 thousand active learners for Navajo, and even 934 thousand active learners for fucking High Valyrian. But yea, no one uses them. Not like the entire Navajo Nation population is 399k members or anything, or like 1.8 million people isn’t 36% of the entire population of Ireland or anything.

And now this. What happened to the upkeep of current courses? Oh, Von Ahn only meant the popular ones that already have infinite resources. Got it. Duolingo used to be a serious foundational resource for languages with little resources while also adding the relief of gamification.

It pisses me off. It really does. This was not what Duolingo started out as. And yea, maybe I shouldn’t get invested in a dingy little app. But as someone who spent most of her adolescence immersed in language learning to the point where it was literally keeping me alive at one point, to the point where languages felt like my only friend as a tween, and to the point where friendships on the Duolingo forums with likeminded individuals my age and other enthusiasts who even sent me books in other languages for free because they wanted people to learn it, the evolution of Duolingo hits a bitter nerve within me.

~End rant.