#2017/03

[tavina-writes]

Hello! So I watched Xiao Zhan's Legend of the Condor Heroes movie today and immediately fell in love with Huang Rong. Also a bit with the Mongolian princess too. And I was wondering which adaptation would be the best to watch for either of these characters. And I thought "who do I know who likes loch and women" and so here I am messaging you lol

Hi hi!

So I think the thing is - most LOCH adaptations are good about their women! Especially Huang Rong, given that she's the main character's love interest. (And honestly, in pretty much every adaptation worth its salt, Rong'er shines FAR brighter than Jing'er and that's...kind of how it's supposed to be taken in universe as well? Huang Rong is brilliant and funny and beautiful and she's so extremely charming and lovely, and Guo Jing is down to earth and steady and good in a way that's rare, but it's hardly ever flashy and he agrees that Rong'er SHOULD steal the show, and part of the wonder of their relationship is just how much they both think the other person is the best thing they've ever seen.)

FWIW here's a scene from CH 26 of LOCH "New Allies, Old Arrangements" that explains what I mean:

On the one side, Guo Jing was telling his teachers about the ins and outs of the situation; on the other side, Huang Yaoshi was leading his daughter by the hand and listening to her giggly chatter, her narrative punctuated with laughter. At first, the Freaks followed what Guo Jing was saying. But he was a dull talker, struggling to convey what he meant in words. Huang Rong, however, not only had a clear, crisp voice, but also a splendid turn of phrase; and when she got to the thrilling bits, her depictions scintillated with a hundred extra tones and colours. One by one, the Six involuntarily went over to listen; Guo Jing, too, finally shut up, turning from a speaker to a listener. Huang Rong did almost an hour’s worth of talking. With her expressions taking full flight – now grave, now comic – everybody listened enraptured to her pearls of wit, as if savouring a charming vintage wine.

So truthfully almost any LOCH will give you these things. (Their treatment of Huazheng...less equal imo lolsob. For Best Huazheng, your best bet is probably LOCH 2003, which also has a FANTASTIC JingRong and other nice perks but...also a pacing problem. It's cdrama, I've never met one without pacing problems lolsob). Anyway, I have seen...all the major TV show adaptations of LOCH since the 1980s (I have yet to locate any footage of any earlier LOCH TV shows alas) so here's my rundown.

Some of my favorite LOCHes include:

LOCH 2017: the most easily accessible as far as plotlines and a "modern" look. Huang Rong is slightly less problematic morally in this one because her dad told her no on more than one occasion before she turned 16 whole years old, but this is overall a very solid and beautiful adaptation! find it on iQIYI.

LOCH 2003: very very solid for a good amount of time, best Mongolia plotlines I have e'er before seen and have since, excellent Huang Rong, excellent JingRong, made, at the time, as the LOCH adaptation to end all LOCH adaptations - it was very high budget. not...really a starter LOCH watch if you don't know any plotlines because this thing is DENSE. It's So Fucking Dense. Find it on Youtube for free.

LOCH 2024: the most modern LOCH show there is! the shots and fight scenes in this are peak beautiful and the clothing and design choices! My favorite Guo Jing and perhaps the best Guo Jing of all time. Unfortunately, EXTREMELY hostile to those who have not already seen LOCH or know the plotlines to LOCH, we're in China by like, ep 1 which means we cut a ton of Guo Jing's childhood. Find it on Youtube for free.

LOCH 1983: my childhood favorite. My beloveds. Perhaps not as charming without nostalgia? and also without English subs so I can't exactly recommend that you see it unless you speak either Mandarin or Cantonese and love 80s Hong Kong TVB special effects...but it IS on Youtube for free.

LOCH 2008: I never really got super into LOCH 08 since it made...some character adaptation choices that I'm not super fond of, and I think without the hindsight of nostalgia some of the special effects here don't hold up as well as more recent adaptations (this can be said for 83, 03, and 94 as well.) I am not sure Huazheng is really in this one, and we spend a lot of time on Yang Kang and Mu Nianci whom I don't think are? in the movie? I think this one is also on Youtube.

LOCH 1994: the sad forgotten stepchild of the major LOCH adaptations, LOCH 94 was TVB's 90s revival of the 1983 cult classic (which, if you talk to any LOCH fan older than say 40, LOCH 83 is THE classic classic version that everyone should see and the new ones don't compare yadayadayada). I'm not entirely certain I like 94. I think at some points I really didn't enjoy LOCH 94. In any case it's inaccessible and without Eng Subs also but it IS on Youtube if you speak Mandarin or Cantonese...

But yeah, uhhh largely LOCH gets an adaptation (and one or several movies) every decade since it started coming out as a book in the 1950s, and while I AM a novel main I've seen pretty much every major TV show adaptation. (I'm not much of a movies girlie and LOCH is like 950k words long so it doesn't quite...gel well in a movie format imo, so I have not seen any of the major LOCH movies.) My prediction is that in 2030 they'll be making a NEW NEW NEW Legend of the Condor Heroes which may or may not be good once again to the delight and dismay of the LOCH fanbase, who all have spines the integrity of a cooked pasta noodle and therefore will go "omg take my money" and watch it anyway.

As I reflect on this, my take is that 1: the novel really is lovely and 2: any one adaptation does not comprehensively do it justice but they're a lot of fun! and 3: holy hell we are so incredibly lucky that there's been so many adaptations over the years.

:D thanks for the ask! Sorry it took so long for me to get to it <3

[seoul-bros]

Feeling Pretty in November 2017 Pt. 1

Such an amazing look for him. Hope we see something like this again

03/11/2024

[fuckthispost-andhappybirthday]

July 03: Happy Birthday Mike Hanlon (Stephen King Universe)!!!!

[thecurioustale]

Wipe Your Hands Off

I just had one of those unbidden outta-the-box moments where it occurred to me what an ~incredibly~ strange and even vaguely unsettling phrase "wipe one's hands off" is.

#SleepPhaseShiftAlternatePerceptualRealityScenicTour

[screenshotfolder]

[thesummerrose23]

Guess who’s still working even if they broke a hip :/

[tavina-writes]

favorite things about 2024 loch thus far?

oh man nonny so many things:

Ci Sha's Guo Jing. I love everything I've seen thus far of his Guo Jing and I think overall the casting was really strong for this production. Every LOCH adaptation has its misses when it comes to overall casting, but thus far all the characters I've seen and their characterizations have been strong and on point, and Ci Sha as Guo Jing has been excellent.

JingRong and their relationship chemistry. Any version of LOCH has to sell you on Guo Jing and Huang Rong's relationship and how much they just think the other person is the greatest person they've ever seen. Like bar none, this is the most important thing that cannot be missing, and this version of JingRong is just SO SO SO CUTE and I am so happy. IMO they join Barbara and Felix (LOCH 83 JingRong) and Zhou Xun and Li Yapeng (LOCH 03 JingRong) among my picks for Favorite JingRongs over the years.

Ming Dao's Hong Qigong. Gotta say, he's becoming a real fave of mine. There's something about his Qigong that strikes a good balance between being a hero and being like well, a real guy who's spent his entire life as a beggar yknow? Like that's commitment to a lifestyle that kind of mostly sucks!

Flashback sequence to HYS and baby Rong'er. DESTROYED BY THIS K THANKS.

[cleoenfaserum]

conquistadores adventum

Conquistadores: Adventum es una miniserie española de 8 episodios de televisión emitida en 2017 dirigida por Israel del Santo. Wikipedia

Aunque el tema especifico de esta ramificación del blog ...

Un VALLISOLETANO en la EPOPEYA de AMERICA: PONCE DE LEON

...que trata sobre el Vallisoletano Juan Ponce de Leon y Alvaro Cabeza de Vaca, ellos aparecen en la serie como indico a continuación, aunque debo confesor, la serie es excelente y debe verse entera.

En la serie española "Conquistadores: Adventum" aparecen Juan Ponce de León y Cabeza de Vaca en los sigueintes episodios:

Juan Ponce de León: Aparece en varios episodios de la serie, destacando su participación en la búsqueda de la fuente de la eterna juventud. En el episodio 8 "El primero en rodearme", se narra la expedición comandada por Pánfilo de Narváez, que busca esta legendaria fuente.

Cabeza de Vaca: También tiene un papel importante en la serie. Su historia se centra en su participación en las expediciones y su supervivencia en el Nuevo Mundo. Cabeza de Vaca aparece en el episodio 4 "Océanos de oro" donde se exploran las relaciones con las tribus indígenas y los desafíos enfrentados por los conquistadores.

Las llaves del Mar: El 2 de enero de 1492, la Reina Isabel de Castilla conquista Granada, el último bastión musulmán de la Península Ibérica. Muchos de los personajes que asisten a los honores de esta victoria son los protagonistas de nuestra historia.

link https://ok.ru/video/7380465289904

El Pequeño Capitán: Este episodio se centra en los eventos posteriores a la conquista de Granada y la preparación para el viaje de Cristóbal Colón.

link https://ok.ru/video/7515573127724

La Caprichosa: La trama sigue los desafíos y las decisiones difíciles que enfrentan los exploradores en su viaje hacia el Nuevo Mundo.

link https://ok.ru/video/7515573324332

Océanos de oro: Alonso de Ojeda establece amistad con el cacique de la tribu que le salva la vida, mientras Núñez de Balboa se pone al mando de las tropas que vienen a ayudar a Pizarro.

link https://ok.ru/video/7515573193260

Huérfanos: Este episodio aborda las dificultades y las pérdidas que enfrentan los conquistadores en su búsqueda de nuevas tierras.

link https://ok.ru/video/7515573258796

Gigantes: Los exploradores se encuentran con nuevas culturas y desafíos en su viaje por el continente americano.

link https://ok.ru/video/7515688733228

Te llamarás Pacífico: La trama se centra en la exploración del Océano Pacífico y los descubrimientos realizados por los conquistadores.

link https://ok.ru/video/7516571372076

El primero en rodearme: Pánfilo de Narváez comanda la expedición más desastrosa: la que busca la fuente de la eterna juventud.

link https://ok.ru/video/7516571306540

[pieterpretorius]

Sunset at the bridge that crosses to the little island at Green Hill Lake

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Your Meta AI prompts are in a live, public feed

I'm in the home stretch of my 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in PDX TOMORROW (June 20) at BARNES AND NOBLE with BUNNIE HUANG and at the TUALATIN public library on SUNDAY (June 22). After that, it's LONDON (July 1) with TRASHFUTURE'S RILEY QUINN and then a big finish in MANCHESTER on July 2.

Back in 2006, AOL tried something incredibly bold and even more incredibly stupid: they dumped a data-set of 20,000,000 "anonymized" search queries from 650,000 users (yes, AOL had a search engine – there used to be lots of search engines!):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_search_log_release

The AOL dump was a catastrophe. In an eyeblink, many of the users in the dataset were de-anonymized. The dump revealed personal, intimate and compromising facts about the lives of AOL search users. The AOL dump is notable for many reasons, not least because it jumpstarted the academic and technical discourse about the limits of "de-identifying" datasets by stripping out personally identifying information prior to releasing them for use by business partners, researchers, or the general public.

It turns out that de-identification is fucking hard. Just a couple of datapoints associated with an "anonymous" identifier can be sufficent to de-anonymize the user in question:

https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1508081113

But firms stubbornly refuse to learn this lesson. They would love it if they could "safely" sell the data they suck up from our everyday activities, so they declare that they can safely do so, and sell giant data-sets, and then bam, the next thing you know, a federal judge's porn-browsing habits are published for all the world to see:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/aug/01/data-browsing-habits-brokers

Indeed, it appears that there may be no way to truly de-identify a data-set:

https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/understanding-the-maths-is-crucial-for-protecting-privacy

Which is a serious bummer, given the potential insights to be gleaned from, say, population-scale health records:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/23/health/data-privacy-protection.html

It's clear that de-identification is not fit for purpose when it comes to these data-sets:

https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~arvindn/publications/precautionary.pdf

But that doesn't mean there's no safe way to data-mine large data-sets. "Trusted research environments" (TREs) can allow researchers to run queries against multiple sensitive databases without ever seeing a copy of the data, and good procedural vetting as to the research questions processed by TREs can protect the privacy of the people in the data:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/01/the-palantir-will-see-you-now/#public-private-partnership

But companies are perennially willing to trade your privacy for a glitzy new product launch. Amazingly, the people who run these companies and design their products seem to have no clue as to how their users use those products. Take Strava, a fitness app that dumped maps of where its users went for runs and revealed a bunch of secret military bases:

https://gizmodo.com/fitness-apps-anonymized-data-dump-accidentally-reveals-1822506098

Or Venmo, which, by default, let anyone see what payments you've sent and received (researchers have a field day just filtering the Venmo firehose for emojis associated with drug buys like "pills" and "little trees"):

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/09/technology/personaltech/venmo-privacy-oversharing.html

Then there was the time that Etsy decided that it would publish a feed of everything you bought, never once considering that maybe the users buying gigantic handmade dildos shaped like lovecraftian tentacles might not want to advertise their purchase history:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2011/03/etsy-users-irked-after-buyers-purchases-exposed-to-the-world/

But the most persistent, egregious and consequential sinner here is Facebook (naturally). In 2007, Facebook opted its 20,000,000 users into a new system called "Beacon" that published a public feed of every page you looked at on sites that partnered with Facebook:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Beacon

Facebook didn't just publish this – they also lied about it. Then they admitted it and promised to stop, but that was also a lie. They ended up paying $9.5m to settle a lawsuit brought by some of their users, and created a "Digital Trust Foundation" which they funded with another $6.5m. Mark Zuckerberg published a solemn apology and promised that he'd learned his lesson.

Apparently, Zuck is a slow learner.

Depending on which "submit" button you click, Meta's AI chatbot publishes a feed of all the prompts you feed it:

https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/12/the-meta-ai-app-is-a-privacy-disaster/

Users are clearly hitting this button without understanding that this means that their intimate, compromising queries are being published in a public feed. Techcrunch's Amanda Silberling trawled the feed and found:

"An audio recording of a man in a Southern accent asking, 'Hey, Meta, why do some farts stink more than other farts?'"

"people ask[ing] for help with tax evasion"

"[whether family members would be arrested for their proximity to white-collar crimes"

"how to write a character reference letter for an employee facing legal troubles, with that person’s first and last name included."

While the security researcher Rachel Tobac found "people’s home addresses and sensitive court details, among other private information":

https://twitter.com/racheltobac/status/1933006223109959820

There's no warning about the privacy settings for your AI prompts, and if you use Meta's AI to log in to Meta services like Instagram, it publishes your Instagram search queries as well, including "big booty women."

As Silberling writes, the only saving grace here is that almost no one is using Meta's AI app. The company has only racked up a paltry 6.5m downloads, across its ~3 billion users, after spending tens of billions of dollars developing the app and its underlying technology.

The AI bubble is overdue for a pop:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/measures/

When it does, it will leave behind some kind of residue – cheaper, spin-out, standalone models that will perform many useful functions:

https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/

Those standalone models were released as toys by the companies pumping tens of billions into the unsustainable "foundation models," who bet that – despite the worst unit economics of any technology in living memory – these tools would someday become economically viable, capturing a winner-take-all market with trillions of upside. That bet remains a longshot, but the littler "toy" models are beating everyone's expectations by wide margins, with no end in sight:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00259-0

I can easily believe that one enduring use-case for chatbots is as a kind of enhanced diary-cum-therapist. Journalling is a well-regarded therapeutic tactic:

https://www.charliehealth.com/post/cbt-journaling

And the invention of chatbots was instantly followed by ardent fans who found that the benefits of writing out their thoughts were magnified by even primitive responses:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect

Which shouldn't surprise us. After all, divination tools, from the I Ching to tarot to Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's Oblique Strategies deck have been with us for thousands of years: even random responses can make us better thinkers:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblique_Strategies

I make daily, extensive use of my own weird form of random divination:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/31/divination/

The use of chatbots as therapists is not without its risks. Chatbots can – and do – lead vulnerable people into extensive, dangerous, delusional, life-destroying ratholes:

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ai-spiritual-delusions-destroying-human-relationships-1235330175/

But that's a (disturbing and tragic) minority. A journal that responds to your thoughts with bland, probing prompts would doubtless help many people with their own private reflections. The keyword here, though, is private. Zuckerberg's insatiable, all-annihilating drive to expose our private activities as an attention-harvesting spectacle is poisoning the well, and he's far from alone. The entire AI chatbot sector is so surveillance-crazed that anyone who uses an AI chatbot as a therapist needs their head examined:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/01/doctor-robo-blabbermouth/#fool-me-once-etc-etc

AI bosses are the latest and worst offenders in a long and bloody lineage of privacy-hating tech bros. No one should ever, ever, ever trust them with any private or sensitive information. Take Sam Altman, a man whose products routinely barf up the most ghastly privacy invasions imaginable, a completely foreseeable consequence of his totally indiscriminate scraping for training data.

Altman has proposed that conversations with chatbots should be protected with a new kind of "privilege" akin to attorney-client privilege and related forms, such as doctor-patient and confessor-penitent privilege:

https://venturebeat.com/ai/sam-altman-calls-for-ai-privilege-as-openai-clarifies-court-order-to-retain-temporary-and-deleted-chatgpt-sessions/

I'm all for adding new privacy protections for the things we key or speak into information-retrieval services of all types. But Altman is (deliberately) omitting a key aspect of all forms of privilege: they immediately vanish the instant a third party is brought into the conversation. The things you tell your lawyer are priviiliged, unless you discuss them with anyone else, in which case, the privilege disappears.

And of course, all of Altman's products harvest all of our information. Altman is the untrusted third party in every conversation everyone has with one of his chatbots. He is the eternal Carol, forever eavesdropping on Alice and Bob:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_and_Bob

Altman isn't proposing that chatbots acquire a privilege, in other words – he's proposing that he should acquire this privilege. That he (and he alone) should be able to mine your queries for new training data and other surveillance bounties.

This is like when Zuckerberg directed his lawyers to destroy NYU's "Ad Observer" project, which scraped Facebook to track the spread of paid political misinformation. Zuckerberg denied that this was being done to evade accountability, insisting (with a miraculously straight face) that it was in service to protecting Facebook users' (nonexistent) privacy:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/05/comprehensive-sex-ed/#quis-custodiet-ipsos-zuck

We get it, Sam and Zuck – you love privacy.

We just wish you'd share.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/19/privacy-invasion-by-design#bringing-home-the-beacon

[midnightmurdershow]

Blue Planet II (2017) Episode 03 “Coral Reefs” Produced by Jonathan Smith

[hellwatermelon]

Tomohide Ikeya

Wave #03, 2016, Wave #10, 2017, WAVE #20, 2023

[melonramune]

2017-04-03

[mentaltimetraveller]

Ham Kyungah, What you see is the unseen / Chandeliers for Five Cities BK 03-06, 2016 - 2017, North Korean hand embroidery, silk threads on cotton, middle man, tension, anxiety, bribe, censorship, ideology, wooden frame, approx. 1700hrs / 2persons, 230 cm × 170 cm (90-9/16" × 66-15/16") © Ham Kyungah

[arthuntblog]

Howard Hodgkin (1932–2017) [UK] - ‘Double Portrait’, 2000-03. Oil on wood (106.7 x 121.9 cm).