#longitud total | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

wen-kexing-apologist · 9 months

Note

Hi....If you don't mind, can I ask, what are your top 10 (or top 7) favorite media (can be books/ manga/ anime/movies/tv series)? Why do you love them? Sorry if you've answered this question before......Thanks....

Thank you for the Ask! Typically I find these questions difficult because I consume a lot of content and I love so many things dearly, and I inevitably forget about things that I cherish and then feel bad about it. So here are 10 of my favorite pieces of media I’ve pulled from my mental list of all the things in the world that have made an impact on me, I’m going to do these in alphabetical order

180 Degrees Longitude Passes Through Us

I only saw this show recently but it is an absolutely gorgeous piece of media. I have a bit of a theater background and this show definitely reads like a stage play, in the dialogue, in the setting, in the way that Nike carries himself around the space as Inthawut. This is a perfect piece of media in my opinion. The performances are a masterclass in acting, the use of vertical lines that place barriers between the characters or that cage them in, the complicated dynamics between the characters, the throughlines of grief and pain and loneliness that just radiates out of the screen for every character in this story. I have been through some shit, let me tell you, but there was a ten second moment in the final episode of this show that sent me in to the worst emotional distress of my entire life for a totally innocuous, complete reasonable, and minimally tragic scene and for that it does deserve immense praise.

Big Eden

I am making up for forgetting to put Pike on my Favorite Characters list by remembering to put Big Eden on my favorite media list! I saw Big Eden for the first time in my freshman year of college. Back then I was not aware of, or at leas was not acknowledging my own queerness, and to find a film like this one just healed a part of my soul I didn’t know was wounded. When I say I watched this film back to back two or three times when I first saw it, I mean that this is one of if not the only film that I have immediately started from the beginning the second that the credits started rolling. I love this film for what it gave me, an older queer romance, non-existent homophobia, PIKE! Some of the greatest lines of all time, that to this day get reactions out of me, mainly:

“I just want things to be nice for him”

and

"Well, screw you, Henry Hart. I do know what love is. You are my family. And I'm sorry... I'm sorry if that's not good enough for you."

And

“Why can’t you see how much love there is that people want to pour on top of you? I can’t help thinking that your grandma and I didn’t do right by you somehow. I feel like maybe we taught you something wrong, because you won’t tell me who you are. Did we teach you shame? Did I teach you that? Because it would break my heart if I had,” (watch the scene here)

Don't let the stars go out at night, don't let the moon break your heart, indeed.

I Told Sunset About You and I Promised You The Moon

ITSAY/IPYTM is two parts of one continuous story and therefore counts as a single piece of media.

I just got done gushing about this show the other night, because for me it is a foundational piece of queer media. It is one of my favorite pieces of media, point blank, period. Queer characters are allowed to complex, three-dimensional, and frustrating. They are allowed to make mistakes, and hurt the people they care about in their quest to better understand themselves. They are human. And the emotional honesty and vulnerability that the script and the actors showed struck deep in to my experiences figuring out my own identity. It has some of the strongest characterization that I have ever seen in media. The actors commit to the craft, the production team clearly put love and care in to every aspect of this show, every frame of it. The director trusted the audience to understand what was happening and trust the actors to play with silence. There is so much silence in this show because the actors portray so much with just the way they move around the space, the way they carry themselves, the way they look at each other. It is a gorgeous, gorgeous piece of media. It took me three watchthroughs of I Told Sunset About You before I was able to form a single analytical thought about it, because the first time I saw this show my brain went fuzzy. This show rewired my brain and changed my DNA.

And as a side note, anyone that thinks that Billkin is a bad actor or a bad crier can kindly meet me outside the Denny’s parking lot at 3am because I will not stand for Billkin slander in my household. That man is absolutely demolished the role of Teh. The constant fidgeting, the way his whole body just screams out whatever he is feeling without him ever having to say a word.

Moonlight Chicken

I have talked numerous times about why this show remains my favorite, and a lot of that has to do with the community that I gained around me because of it. But stepping back to the piece itself, I love how much this show is really dedicated to the importance of community. To showing the different mindsets of three generations of queer people, the way they struggle and don’t. The conversations that happen around poverty, and disability, and grief. The way that Li Ming and Heart are screaming to be understood. The way Jim has been hurt too many times and how that makes him scared to start over with Wen. The way Aof was able to take this BL structure and transform it into the story whose primary focus is on how a queer elder keeps and cultivates a relationship with his queer nephew. Jim and Li Ming’s relationship is the focal point of this show and I am so grateful to have that. The acting is phenomenal, the lighting is incredible, and it is a very technically strong piece. I know that Aof tends to tell us sad gay stories, but by god am I in love with every single Aof show I have seen (GOBK(with Jojo), ATOTS, HCTM, BB, MLC)

Pushing Daisies

What a deeply deeply tragic story wrapped up in the shiniest paper! I will never get over the fact this show got canceled because it is one of the greatest of all time. I love that Lee Pace has acknowledged how queer this show is, and how intentional that was, even though it was not discussed at the time of its release. Like, fundamentally this is a show about a man named Ned and his partner Chuck who can never touch. I’ll talk about this a little later too, but I am just such a sucker for stories where people can’t touch each other. I love the angst in it, the wanting to, the need to be intimate, to comfort, to care for someone and just…not being able to hold them. I loved watching how Ned and Chuck navigated this issue, the kissing through plastic wrap, the dancing in beekeeper suits, them getting excited for winter cause it meant they could wear gloves and hold hands like any other couple.

This show is hilarious and funny and fast, with a really intriguing concept and an extremely clear vision and it did not deserve the end it got.

I heard it might be on HBO Max, not sure if that is still true, but if you can find you, and you haven’t seen it, you should absolutely watch it, and if you have seen it, this is your reminder to watch it again.

Sense8

Before I begin, I just want to say

FUCK

NETFLIX

Once again, another incredible show, with very interesting themes, and things to say was canceled before it’s time. I will die mad about the fact that Netflix did not give this show the room it deserved to tell the story THAT THEY PITCHED TO NETFLIX AS A FIVE SEASON ARC. This show was so good, it got my homophobic dad to watch the whole thing without even squirming at the gay sex (like he did when he watched Game of Thrones).

I love love love love love this show. I love the way it connects people from all over the world, I love that these random strangers become a family, I love what it says about every day people being important, having important skills, and how much that can vary from being a good actor, knowing chemistry, driving, and being a skilled martial artist. I love how sex positive this show was. I love the utilization of orgies to demonstrate the way these characters are all connected to each other. I loved the mystery behind it all, they way the function of this psyllium network got progressively more understandable to us as time went on in much the same way that the characters get used to it. I love the humanization of drug users, that it touches on the struggles of trans people, queer people, eldest daughters, poor people, etc etc etc; ON BODY AUTONOMY IN MEDICINE!!! I truly believe there is something for everyone in this show and even though I am mad we really only got a two hour filmed storyboard of general concepts the Wachowski sisters were planning on diving in to over the next three seasons, I do love with my whole heart, for the memes, that Nom’s mother gets over her transphobia as a result of one very good weed brownie.

Six of Crows and Crooked Kingdom

I got in to these books after seeing the first season of Shadow and Bone on Netflix. Full disclosure, I did not read the Shadow and Bone trilogy, I will not read the Shadow and Bone trilogy, I do not care about the Shadow and Bone trilogy. This is a Crows Only household. Six of Crows and Crooked Kingdom are very incredible heist books first of all. The main plot is compelling in and of itself, before you even add the characters in to it. And what phenomenal characters we have: Kaz, Inej, Jesper, Wylan, Matthias, NINA MY BELOVED. I’m glad they aged them up for the show, but it is very funny to me to think of a bunch of gremlin teenagers running around and taking down criminal empires for the sake of revenge...and coin. Leigh Bardugo is a disabled woman and I love that she gave Kaz her same disability because it means that we get a really authentic portrayal of disability. His cane is seen as important, he is never embarrassed by it, and his chronic pain is always highlighted. (can we also talk about how pissed Kaz was when Genya offered to fix his leg?). I love how contradictory he is, how much he loves Inej and wants to be with her, and wants to touch her, and the way his trauma and touch repulsion just constantly stops him from being physical able to do what he actually wants. Inej, who loves Kaz back, and sees the boy underneath the image of a monster he has crafted for himself, who has her own hang ups around touch and understands Kaz, but values herself enough to not pursue a relationship with him if he will not or cannot work on himself. Who grew claws with the knives she carries with her, who herself is a walking contradiction, deeply religious and also murderous, and so brave, and kind, and patient, and who I love with my whole heart.

Wylan, whose own father tried to have him killed because he was dyslexic. Jesper who has been hiding who he is because of what his power did to his mother, who is always the comedic relief while harboring pain, our favorite gambling addict, ADHD, gunslinger. Matthais who has to confront a lifetime’s worth of propaganda. Nina who is just an all around badass motherfucker, who is fat and sexy and brilliant. My favorite superspy <3

The Fall (2006) dir. Tarsem Singh

You really have to go looking for this film if you ever want to watch it, because it has almost entirely been wiped away, which sucks because it is one of my favorite movies. Why?

Because it is one of, if not the most visually stunning piece of media I have ever seen. The plot for this film is a stuntman (played by Lee Pace) falls, is injured, and hospitalized at the same time as a 5-year-old Romanian immigrant who fell and broke her arm picking oranges. Roy (the stuntman) starts telling Alexandria (the little girl) a story, to manipulate her in to doing things for him, like spying on people and stealing pain meds. The movie cuts between real life, present day, and this grandiose epic tale that he is telling. This was 150% a passion project on Tarsem’s part, he spent 30 million of his own money making this movie, for it to only make 3 million in theaters upon it’s release. It took four years to film and was filmed in 24 different locations.

I love the overarching story, and how the growing friendship Roy builds with this little girl literally saves his life. The cast of characters is certainly interesting, Charles Darwin is a character in Roy’s story, but by GOD is it just a great watch, hours of stunning cinematography, with incredible costumes. Would highly recommend watching this if you can find it.

The Magnus Archives

I love this podcast for many reasons. First, because I think it was absolutely brilliant to start this show off as almost an anthology, lulling the audience in to a false sense of security by having each early episode be completely unrelated to one another, until they aren’t. Until names start popping up in multiple tales, until monsters and ghosts and any number of other unexplained creepy things start showing up in other people’s stories. How slowly you start to realize everything is connected and always has been. That set up was just…beautifully handled. Second, I love what this show says about survival and fear. That the more we believe in fear, the more powerful it gets. I love how often the survivors of these tales come out the other side of these experiences by thinking of people that are important to them, people they love. When The Buried tried to get that spelunker trapped in the cave, it was the thought of finding her sister, of getting help for her sister that got her through the other side. When Martin is in The Lonely, it is his thoughts of Jon that get him through the other side. I love that the avatar of Death is kind. I love that the Boneturner just wants to build a garden. I love the experiences and the world that Johnathan Simms builds in every story, and that he is able to create so many different types of fears, a little something for everyone. I love the heart at the center of this show.

The Princess Bride

Again, another piece of media that is fast paced and full of quips, with a beautiful, ridiculous, hilarious story, and a solid emotional core. I was raised on this film, which is part of why I love it so much. You can see and feel how much fun the cast had making this film. To this day it is beloved, highly quotable, and poignant. Also a great fencing movie, but I’m biased on that end as a fencer myself. I don't have much more to say about this film because I think it is perfect and I have no notes, but I will say I love how much this film helped Mandy Patinkin process his own grief around the loss of his father.

#wka answers #180 degree longitude passes through us #180d #big eden #i told sunset about you #i promised you the moon #itsay #ipytm #moonlight chicken #mlc #pushing daisies #sense8 #six of crows #crooked kingdom #the fall #the fall (2006)#the magnus archives #tma #the princess bride

121 notes · View notes

navegandoportumentedenuevo · 2 months

Text

Regreso del reino de Morfeo tras un reparador sueño, recobro la consciencia poco a poco...

Algo no es normal,

algo sucede que se escapa del insulso amanecer...

Siento un calor familiar,

una humedad que activa placenteros recuerdos...

La consciencia llega a mi sin prisa pero sin pausa,

lo que sirve para darme cuenta que tus manos se aferran a mis muslos mientras tu boca engulle mi aún flacido miembro...

La escena que se presenta ante mí mientras me incorporo es brutalmente excitante...

Haces una pausa en tus maniobras orales,

levantas ligeramente la cabeza y me das los buenos días con un fino hilo de saliva escapándose de tu boca...

- "Me pone muy cachonda sentir como tu p0ll@ crece poco a poco en mi boca"

Sin darme tiempo a contestar capturas de golpe mi brillante glande en tu boca lo hace que mi cabeza vuelva a caer sobre mi sudada almohada exhalando un profundo bufido...

Ya completamente despierto siento con total plenitud cada uno de los estímulos que provienen de tu experta felación...

Tu lengua parece estar poseída por algún demonio ancestral, sus movimientos parecen querer pulir las aristas de mi encharcado glande, y eso me vuelve loco...

Sacas mi erecto miembro tu boca infernal,

brillante y encharcado del lustre que le has regalado, respiras atropelladamente para recuperar el resuello y descansar durante unos instantes...

Tu rostro resplandece lleno de satisfacción y picardia, de esa amalgama de mi líquido pre erupción y tu cálida saliva,

tus pupilas dilatadas y tu perversa mirada se clavan en las mías...

Cómo me ponen tu actitud y tus ganas!!

A continuación tu lengua me recorre en toda la longitud carnal,

mi p3n3 se ha convertido en tu helado favorito,

eres como una colegiala en pleno verano disfrutando de su polo de fresa comprado con su primera paga...

A continuación ese guiño característico que tan bien conozco y que tan intensas oleadas de placer me ha regalado siempre, sé que estoy en tus manos (literalmente) y a tu merced,

sé que en breves instantes dejaré mi raciocinio a un lado y sólo seré un amasijo de espasmos,

jadeos profundos,

y convulsiones eyaculatorias...

Benditos despertares...

©Navegandoportumente

23 notes · View notes

far-side-skies · 13 days

Note

You're the #1 person i think would answer this in earnest so, what do you think the edge of the atmos is? So we obviously know about the far side being seperated by impassable mountains, but the other ends, do the sky cities stop and become a flatland? A desert? An ocean? The atmos has to be a continent right? But there has to be a point where they stop and different ecosystems begin. Are there other continents past the atmos that run on different rules? How would they cross the gap? What creatures or dieties rule in the other lands? Figured i'd ask you

This... this got long. Holy shit it got long. The readmore is there for a reason.

I noticed this ask when I was at work with about an hour left on my shift. You have no idea how tempted I was to make a video response to this question through pure enthusiasm and finally launch into my ambition of making YouTube videos about this cartoon XD

First of all, thank you so much for thinking of me, and I will absolutely answer this question with 100% earnest.

Secondly, I didn't really have an answer for this question until you asked it. Having full-on continents isn't really something I really felt a need for in Storm Hawks and Atmos, especially after I came up with headcanons to explain how Terras work and why they work that way. However this ask got me thinking :3

Let's start at the beginning. Atmos was made by a storm. Specifically the First Storm, believed to be the birth of a god of the same name, and the total destruction of an old world. Chaotic, destructive this newborn god shattered what would become Atmos into thousands of pieces and in its youthful madness it struck out at its elders. Death (aka Decay) lost an eye, Magic lost a heart that was flung into the path of a comet, which was one of the fire avatar's children. They caught fire like sparks to kindling. The howling drew the curiosity of the Flesh (aka Life), and the ire of the Manywing (the winds).

Whatever flat, unblemished world existed before this event is long gone and devoured by Decay, though it's possible a few traces of its inhabitants survived. Though they were changed by the energy of this great cataclysm. Atmos calls the descendants of these survivors the Giants.

"Storms made us. Storms tore us apart. And now storms will help us rebuild" - Master Cyclonis, Age of Heroes Pt. 2, timestamp ~13:05

Please ignore how YouTube absolutely bungled that auto caption, but this is the line that inspired the headcanon for an Atmos creation 'myth' (it is a very real event but gets heavily debated in-universe), which I've held onto for a good two or so years now.

This wave of destruction created the Wastelands, and Terras came about when pieces of raw crystal energy fell to Atmos and eventually formed giant crystal deposits, around which earth, dirt and stone formed, making way for new life such as plants and animals. So essentially Terras are giant crystal geodes. The type of crystal that makes up their core is likely to affect its climate, which is how I am able to get away with worldbuilding choices such as placing Blizaris on the same longitude as, say, Tropica.

Because of this, I never considered any actual continents on Atmos. The First Storm was an event of worldwide destruction, absolutely nowhere was left unscathed, so no matter how far someone travels, it's Terras all over.

But this ask got me thinking 'ok what if there was? Why would there be any?'

Well the answer is that a continent did survive the First Storm. Maybe more than one, but I want to focus on what you can find there, and that is giants.

Time to bring in Gundstaff. Fun fact, I made him despicable. But that's not what we're here to discuss.

Who the fuck is this man besides a crystal hoarder who gets robbed for plot??? In the three episodes he's in, for a total amount of screentime that I'm pretty sure doesn't exceed even five minutes, all we learn about him is that he hates people, is a giant, has a huge crystal collection, and his unnamed, blink-and-you-miss-it wife and child are presumably being held captive by Cyclonia. The only reason I'm not saying the wife and child are dead is because if they were, Gundstaff would likely have gone "fuck it, I'm working against you because you have nothing to hold over my head" long before Payback when he whoops ass for Piper.

RIP to Gundstaff's family, currently residing somewhere in the fridge. Photo seen in Payback.

Gundstaff's very existence, and that of his supposed familiy, brings up several questions. Why do we not see any other giants in Atmos? Why does the cast not seem to treat his existence like a total anomaly? Is he the last giant in existance? I personally don't think so. If that's the case, then where the hell are they all?? How far flung are they that we only see a single member of this race three times across 52 episodes over a space of at least 36 Terras if you count the ones that aren't physically visited in the show?

This is Gundstaff's home as seen in Five Days about 60 seconds in. It's... pretty small. Bro doesn't have a lot of space to move, and there's no sign of any other inhabitants, least of all any his size.

So where are the giants? Why is Gundstaff living in a place that doesn't feel very suited to his stature?

Because it's not really where he belongs.

The biggest landmasses in Atmos are the homelands of giants. There's space for them to move freely, they don't have to worry about crossing the Wastelands to get anywhere (though I do headcanon giants to have powerful innate magic that allows them to travel great distances without worry, and that the greatest of giants can grow to the size of Terras). I think these continents, aka Giant Country, are relatively flat and follow more 'logical' geology more akin to what we'd find in real life. I'm not set on what kind of climate it is just yet. Crystals are quite scarce here, as the ground isn't suitable for deposits to develop, so giants will venture out into the wider Atmos to gather resources. Some will stay long-term for various reasons such as for research, to make Champions (something of an 'art' among giants gifted with what I call "Artisan magic"), or because they were exiled.

I'm not sure why Gundstaff isn't living in Giant Country just yet. Maybe he was exiled, or he was staying in Atmos for research, or he and his wife were making plans to return to Giant Country with their child, but got torn apart by Cyclonia just before that plan was set into motion. If it weren't for his wife and child, I feel like Gundstaff would've returned to Giant Country long ago.

So to answer your question, I don't really think there is an 'edge' of Atmos. If it weren't for the Barrier Cliffs, if you travelled in one direction for long enough, you'd wind up back where you started without running into an 'edge'. But you might just find Giant Country, and that may as well feel like the edge of Atmos. It's quite different there.

I was not expecting to go this in-depth regarding this question, but this was a blast to figure out so thanks a ton for asking me about this Peregrine :3 I hope this answer satisfies you.

#ask: answered #princess-peregrine #storm hawks #storm hawks headcanons #storm hawks lore #sunny's headcanons #sunnyverse headcanons #sunnyverse lore #sunny's storm hawks headcanons #storm hawks headcanon

12 notes · View notes

michaeldswanson · 13 days

Text

Apple’s Mysterious Fisheye Projection

If you’ve read my first post about Spatial Video, the second about Encoding Spatial Video, or if you’ve used my command-line tool, you may recall a mention of Apple’s mysterious “fisheye” projection format. Mysterious because they’ve documented a CMProjectionType.fisheye enumeration with no elaboration, they stream their immersive Apple TV+ videos in this format, yet they’ve provided no method to produce or playback third-party content using this projection type.

Additionally, the format is undocumented, they haven’t responded to an open question on the Apple Discussion Forums asking for more detail, and they didn’t cover it in their WWDC23 sessions. As someone who has experience in this area – and a relentless curiosity – I’ve spent time digging-in to Apple’s fisheye projection format, and this post shares what I’ve learned.

As stated in my prior post, I am not an Apple employee, and everything I’ve written here is based on my own history, experience (specifically my time at immersive video startup, Pixvana, from 2016-2020), research, and experimentation. I’m sure that some of this is incorrect, and I hope we’ll all learn more at WWDC24.

Spherical Content

Imagine sitting in a swivel chair and looking straight ahead. If you tilt your head to look straight up (at the zenith), that’s 90 degrees. Likewise, if you were looking straight ahead and tilted your head all the way down (at the nadir), that’s also 90 degrees. So, your reality has a total vertical field-of-view of 90 + 90 = 180 degrees.

Sitting in that same chair, if you swivel 90 degrees to the left or 90 degrees to the right, you’re able to view a full 90 + 90 = 180 degrees of horizontal content (your horizontal field-of-view). If you spun your chair all the way around to look at the “back half” of your environment, you would spin past a full 360 degrees of content.

When we talk about immersive video, it’s common to only refer to the horizontal field-of-view (like 180 or 360) with the assumption that the vertical field-of-view is always 180. Of course, this doesn’t have to be true, because we can capture whatever we’d like, edit whatever we’d like, and playback whatever we’d like.

But when someone says something like VR180, they really mean immersive video that has a 180-degree horizontal field-of-view and a 180-degree vertical field-of-view. Similarly, 360 video is 360-degrees horizontally by 180-degrees vertically.

Projections

When immersive video is played back in a device like the Apple Vision Pro, the Meta Quest, or others, the content is displayed as if a viewer’s eyes are at the center of a sphere watching video that is displayed on its inner surface. For 180-degree content, this is a hemisphere. For 360-degree content, this is a full sphere. But it can really be anything in between; at Pixvana, we sometimes referred to this as any-degree video.

It's here where we run into a small problem. How do we encode this immersive, spherical content? All the common video codecs (H.264, VP9, HEVC, MV-HEVC, AVC1, etc.) are designed to encode and decode data to and from a rectangular frame. So how do you take something like a spherical image of the Earth (i.e. a globe) and store it in a rectangular shape? That sounds like a map to me. And indeed, that transformation is referred to as a map projection.

Equirectangular

While there are many different projection types that each have useful properties in specific situations, spherical video and images most commonly use an equirectangular projection. This is a very simple transformation to perform (it looks more complicated than it is). Each x location on a rectangular image represents a longitude value on a sphere, and each y location represents a latitude. That’s it. Because of these relationships, this kind of projection can also be called a lat/long.

Imagine “peeling” thin one-degree-tall strips from a globe, starting at the equator. We start there because it’s the longest strip. To transform it to a rectangular shape, start by pasting that strip horizontally across the middle of a sheet of paper (in landscape orientation). Then, continue peeling and pasting up or down in one-degree increments. Be sure to stretch each strip to be as long as the first, meaning that the very short strips at the north and south poles are stretched a lot. Don’t break them! When you’re done, you’ll have a 360-degree equirectangular projection that looks like this.

If you did this exact same thing with half of the globe, you’d end up with a 180-degree equirectangular projection, sometimes called a half-equirect. Performed digitally, it’s common to allocate the same number of pixels to each degree of image data. So, for a full 360-degree by 180-degree equirect, the rectangular video frame would have an aspect ratio of 2:1 (the horizontal dimension is twice the vertical dimension). For 180-degree by 180-degree video, it’d be 1:1 (a square). Like many things, these aren’t hard and fast rules, and for technical reasons, sometimes frames are stretched horizontally or vertically to fit within the capabilities of an encoder or playback device.

This is a 180-degree half equirectangular image overlaid with a grid to illustrate its distortions. It was created from the standard fisheye image further below. Watch an animated version of this transformation.

What we’ve described so far is equivalent to monoscopic (2D) video. For stereoscopic (3D) video, we need to pack two of these images into each frame…one for each eye. This is usually accomplished by arranging two images in a side-by-side or over/under layout. For full 360-degree stereoscopic video in an over/under layout, this makes the final video frame 1:1 (because we now have 360 degrees of image data in both dimensions). As described in my prior post on Encoding Spatial Video, though, Apple has chosen to encode stereo video using MV-HEVC, so each eye’s projection is stored in its own dedicated video layer, meaning that the reported video dimensions match that of a single eye.

Standard Fisheye

Most immersive video cameras feature one or more fisheye lenses. For 180-degree stereo (the short way of saying stereoscopic) video, this is almost always two lenses in a side-by-side configuration, separated by ~63-65mm, very much like human eyes (some 180 cameras).

The raw frames that are captured by these cameras are recorded as fisheye images where each circular image area represents ~180 degrees (or more) of visual content. In most workflows, these raw fisheye images are transformed into an equirectangular or half-equirectangular projection for final delivery and playback.

This is a 180 degree standard fisheye image overlaid with a grid. This image is the source of the other images in this post.

Apple’s Fisheye

This brings us to the topic of this post. As I stated in the introduction, Apple has encoded the raw frames of their immersive videos in a “fisheye” projection format. I know this, because I’ve monitored the network traffic to my Apple Vision Pro, and I’ve seen the HLS streaming manifests that describe each of the network streams. This is how I originally discovered and reported that these streams – in their highest quality representations – are ~50Mbps, HDR10, 4320x4320 per eye, at 90fps.

While I can see the streaming manifests, I am unable to view the raw video frames, because all the immersive videos are protected by DRM. This makes perfect sense, and while I’m a curious engineer who would love to see a raw fisheye frame, I am unwilling to go any further. So, in an earlier post, I asked anyone who knew more about the fisheye projection type to contact me directly. Otherwise, I figured I’d just have to wait for WWDC24.

Lo and behold, not a week or two after my post, an acquaintance introduced me to Andrew Chang who said that he had also monitored his network traffic and noticed that the Apple TV+ intro clip (an immersive version of this) is streamed in-the-clear. And indeed, it is encoded in the same fisheye projection. Bingo! Thank you, Andrew!

Now, I can finally see a raw fisheye video frame. Unfortunately, the frame is mostly black and featureless, including only an Apple TV+ logo and some God rays. Not a lot to go on. Still, having a lot of experience with both practical and experimental projection types, I figured I’d see what I could figure out. And before you ask, no, I’m not including the actual logo, raw frame, or video in this post, because it’s not mine to distribute.

Immediately, just based on logo distortions, it’s clear that Apple’s fisheye projection format isn’t the same as a standard fisheye recording. This isn’t too surprising, given that it makes little sense to encode only a circular region in the center of a square frame and leave the remainder black; you typically want to use all the pixels in the frame to send as much data as possible (like the equirectangular format described earlier).

Additionally, instead of seeing the logo horizontally aligned, it’s rotated 45 degrees clockwise, aligning it with the diagonal that runs from the upper-left to the lower-right of the frame. This makes sense, because the diagonal is the longest dimension of the frame, and as a result, it can store more horizontal (post-rotation) pixels than if the frame wasn’t rotated at all.

This is the same standard fisheye image from above transformed into a format that seems very similar to Apple’s fisheye format. Watch an animated version of this transformation.

Likewise, the diagonal from the lower-left to the upper-right represents the vertical dimension of playback (again, post-rotation) providing a similar increase in available pixels. This means that – during rotated playback – the now-diagonal directions should contain the least amount of image data. Correctly-tuned, this likely isn’t visible, but it’s interesting to note.

More Pixels

You might be asking, where do these “extra” pixels come from? I mean, if we start with a traditional raw circular fisheye image captured from a camera and just stretch it out to cover a square frame, what have we gained? Those are great questions that have many possible answers.

This is why I liken video processing to turning knobs in a 747 cockpit: if you turn one of those knobs, you more-than-likely need to change something else to balance it out. Which leads to turning more knobs, and so on. Video processing is frequently an optimization problem just like this. Some initial thoughts:

It could be that the source video is captured at a higher resolution, and when transforming the video to a lower resolution, the “extra” image data is preserved by taking advantage of the square frame.

Perhaps the camera optically transforms the circular fisheye image (using physical lenses) to fill more of the rectangular sensor during capture. This means that we have additional image data to start and storing it in this expanded fisheye format allows us to preserve more of it.

Similarly, if we record the image using more than two lenses, there may be more data to preserve during the transformation. For what it’s worth, it appears that Apple captures their immersive videos with a two-lens pair, and you can see them hiding in the speaker cabinets in the Alicia Keys video.

There are many other factors beyond the scope of this post that can influence the design of Apple’s fisheye format. Some of them include distortion handling, the size of the area that’s allocated to each pixel, where the “most important” pixels are located in the frame, how high-frequency details affect encoder performance, how the distorted motion in the transformed frame influences motion estimation efficiency, how the pixels are sampled and displayed during playback, and much more.

Blender

But let’s get back to that raw Apple fisheye frame. Knowing that the image represents ~180 degrees, I loaded up Blender and started to guess at a possible geometry for playback based on the visible distortions. At that point, I wasn’t sure if the frame encodes faces of the playback geometry or if the distortions are related to another kind of mathematical mapping. Some of the distortions are more severe than expected, though, and my mind couldn’t imagine what kind of mesh corrected for those distortions (so tempted to blame my aphantasia here, but my spatial senses are otherwise excellent).

One of the many meshes and UV maps that I’ve experimented with in Blender.

Radial Stretching

If you’ve ever worked with projection mappings, fisheye lenses, equirectangular images, camera calibration, cube mapping techniques, and so much more, Google has inevitably led you to one of Paul Bourke’s many fantastic articles. I’ve exchanged a few e-mails with Paul over the years, so I reached out to see if he had any insight.

After some back-and-forth discussion over a couple of weeks, we both agreed that Apple’s fisheye projection is most similar to a technique called radial stretching (with that 45-degree clockwise rotation thrown in). You can read more about this technique and others in Mappings between Sphere, Disc, and Square and Marc B. Reynolds’ interactive page on Square/Disc mappings.

Basically, though, imagine a traditional centered, circular fisheye image that touches each edge of a square frame. Now, similar to the equirectangular strip-peeling exercise I described earlier with the globe, imagine peeling one-degree wide strips radially from the center of the image and stretching those along the same angle until they touch the edge of the square frame. As the name implies, that’s radial stretching. It’s probably the technique you’d invent on your own if you had to come up with something.

By performing the reverse of this operation on a raw Apple fisheye frame, you end up with a pretty good looking version of the Apple TV+ logo. But, it’s not 100% correct. It appears that there is some additional logic being used along the diagonals to reduce the amount of radial stretching and distortion (and perhaps to keep image data away from the encoded corners). I’ve experimented with many approaches, but I still can’t achieve a 100% match. My best guess so far uses simple beveled corners, and this is the same transformation I used for the earlier image.

It's also possible that this last bit of distortion could be explained by a specific projection geometry, and I’ve iterated over many permutations that get close…but not all the way there. For what it’s worth, I would be slightly surprised if Apple was encoding to a specific geometry because it adds unnecessary complexity to the toolchain and reduces overall flexibility.

While I have been able to playback the Apple TV+ logo using the techniques I’ve described, the frame lacks any real detail beyond its center. So, it’s still possible that the mapping I’ve arrived at falls apart along the periphery. Guess I’ll continue to cross my fingers and hope that we learn more at WWDC24.

Conclusion

This post covered my experimentation with the technical aspects of Apple’s fisheye projection format. Along the way, it’s been fun to collaborate with Andrew, Paul, and others to work through the details. And while we were unable to arrive at a 100% solution, we’re most definitely within range.

The remaining questions I have relate to why someone would choose this projection format over half-equirectangular. Clearly Apple believes there are worthwhile benefits, or they wouldn’t have bothered to build a toolchain to capture, process, and stream video in this format. I can imagine many possible advantages, and I’ve enumerated some of them in this post. With time, I’m sure we’ll learn more from Apple themselves and from experiments that all of us can run when their fisheye format is supported by existing tools.

It's an exciting time to be revisiting immersive video, and we have Apple to thank for it.

As always, I love hearing from you. It keeps me motivated! Thank you for reading.

#spatial #apple vision pro #video

12 notes · View notes

noticiasarquelogicasjaponesas · 15 days

Text

Sean bienvenidos, japonsistasarqueológicos, a una nueva entrega arqueológica, en esta ocasión os voy a hablar del túmulo Shofuku-ji una vez dicho esto, pónganse cómodos que empezamos. - ¿Dónde se localiza el túmulo Shofuku-ji? Se localiza en la ciudad de Kawanishi, en la prefectura de Hyōgo, localizado a su vez en la región de Kansai. La cámara funeraria se descubrió en la era Meiji. En 1934, el Dr. Sueharu Umehara de la Universidad de Kyoto realizó un estudio de campo y en la década de 1970, se realizó un estudio llevado a cabo por la Junta de Educación de la ciudad de Kawanishi que descubrió un ataúd de madera en la que se enterraron: puntas de flecha de hierro, espadas de hierro. - Data del siglo V y el siglo V y corresponde al periodo Kofun, con una longitud total de 40 m y fue construido a principios del siglo VI. Se descubrió un haniwa, que fue desenterrado durante la excavación, y se hizo de una manera muy similar al haniwa en la región de Owari que corresponde a la actual prefectura occidental de Aichi. - Espero que os haya gustado y nos vemos en próximas publicaciones, que pasen una buena semana. 日本の考古学者の皆さん、ようこそ！今回は、正福寺古墳についてお話します！では、早速始めましょう。 - 正福寺塚はどこにあるのですか？関西地方に位置する兵庫県川西市にあります。古墳が発見されたのは、明治時代です。1934年に京都大学の梅原末治博士が現地調査を行い、1970年代には川西市教育委員会の調査で木棺が発見され、その中に鉄鏃、鉄剣、鉄刀が埋められていました。 - 5～5世紀の古墳時代に相当し、全長40m、6世紀初頭に造られたものである。発掘調査で出土した埴輪は、現在の愛知県西部の尾張地方にある埴輪と酷似した作りのものが発見されています。

Welcome, Japanese archaeologists, to a new archaeological instalment, this time I am going to talk to you about the Shofuku-ji tumulus, having said that, make yourselves comfortable and let's get started. - Where is the Shofuku-ji mound located? It is located in the city of Kawanishi, Hyōgo Prefecture, located in the Kansai region. The burial chamber was discovered in the Meiji era. In 1934, Dr. Sueharu Umehara of Kyoto University conducted a field survey and in the 1970s, a survey conducted by the Kawanishi City Board of Education uncovered a wooden coffin in which were buried: iron arrowheads, iron swords, and iron swords. - It dates from the 5th-5th century and corresponds to the Kofun period, with a total length of 40 m and was built in the early 6th century. A haniwa, which was unearthed during excavation, was discovered and made in a very similar manner to the haniwa in the Owari region of what is now western Aichi Prefecture. - I hope you liked it and see you in future posts, have a nice week.

7 notes · View notes

bengiyo · 1 year

Text

BL 2022 Review

I debated how I would go about reviewing this year, and quickly tossed out any sort of list approach. Anything like a top 10 or 20 would feel disrespectful to many of the smaller projects I watched this year that had something worthwhile to discuss. Instead, I’ve decided to talk about BL with major topics that stick with me as I review the 80+ shows I watched this year.

Reviewing the totals, as of the writing of this post I have completed, attempted, or am watching three shows from the Philippines, 49 from Thailand, five from Taiwan, 20 from South Korea, one from mainland China, 14 from Japan, and five from the West, for a total of 79 completed or watching plus 13 attempted. This included other QL projects as well. I’m reviewing a list of all BL projects from this year and the number was approximately 131. We’ve never had more choice than this, and I absolutely cannot watch this much again next year.

In this long essay, I plan to talk about what I enjoyed out of the actor chemistry this year, the ways BL has become more political, how specific and powerful coming of age narratives continue to be in genre, the ways BL used the supernatural to talk about grief and loss, the intergenerational relationships appearing in genre, the expansion of the genre into adulthood, the ongoing competition amongst college narratives, our first forays into GL, and the continued divide with the West. That’s a lot, so I’m just going to put all of that behind a cut.

First, Some Thanks

Before we get started, I want to give shoutouts to the clowns I got to know this year and who have been so much fun to engage with this year since we met on Bad Buddy. In no particular order: @shortpplfedup, @kyr-kun-chan, @liyazaki, @elnotwoods, @flukenatouch, @gilly-bean, and so many more whose handles I always forget outside of our other chats. Also a shout out to the 180 Degree Longitude Passes Through Us fandom. We were tiny, but I loved interacting with all of you.

The Boys Who Were Ready to Risk It All

I don’t always require the boys to have high levels of heat in my romances, but I do like believing that the characters genuinely desire each other. With Japan reentering the genre with their specific brand of reticence, and with Korea clearing the lane for their own form of clean romance*, I was not surprised to see Thailand turning up the heat in their shows to compete. All-in-all, this was an absolutely stellar year for chemistry across the board.

Starting with the Philippines, I noticed that I watched far fewer shows from them this year, but two in particular made me BELIEVE. In Gameboys 2 Elijah Canlas and Kokoy de Santos continued to display the absolutely electric and believable desire between Cairo and Gavreel. You could feel how suddenly their attraction came on, and the desperation of their quarantine bubble’s time ticking away as they tried to make being a couple work. I especially enjoyed how they explored their differing levels in sexual experience and readiness before delivering one of the better bed scenes of the year.

Meanwhile, in Sleep With Me Janine and Lovi made the first time between Harry and Luna look genuinely fun for their characters. The morning after sharing between them was one of the most comfortably intimate things I’ve seen all year.

Thailand offered up a wide array this year, from the extremely light or chaste La Cuisine and 21 Days Theory; to the passionate in Dear Doctor, I’m Coming for Soul and Triage, to the shows-with-something-to-prove in KinnPorsche, Love in the Air, and Love Mechanics. However, I’d like to highlight how much I genuinely believed in the sexual desire from Mile and Apo in KinnPorsche, Boy and Tod in Ghost Host, Ghost House; Zee and NuNew in Cutie Pie; both Boss and Noeul, and Peat and Forth, in Love in the Air; and Mos and ISBANKY in Big Dragon. No disrespect to Yin and War, but we already knew they could bring it.

With Apo and Mile, we saw expressions of sexual acts and desire from guys in this genre that it almost feels taboo for the genre to use with its preference for top/bottom acts. “A blowjob in a helicopter” became a “jumping the shark” joke for this year for a lot of valid reasons, but Kinn and Porsche engaging in mutual masturbation and oral sex was the most refreshing part of the sexual chemistry of that show.

Tod and Boy gave such a believable show of wanting each other that it gave me flashbacks to ITSAY Episode 3. Pluem’s clear love for Kevin’s legs, and their frank conversation about sex and readiness, along with their language play about making each other equal with English pronouns, made them one of my standouts for the year. Beyond that, the way they quickly fell into casual intimacy in the latter half the show elevates it above much this year.

We knew Zee could deliver on heat from Why R U (2020) with Saint, but I was surprised by how effectively he arrived at that same level with newcomer New Chawarin. I still think about the kitchen scene where Lian lifts Nu-Kuea onto the counter to stare up at him with open love and desire as he reassures him that he is everything to him. Thai fans jokingly review bombed the kettle model used in that scene for interrupting it, that’s how intense that scene was.

As usual with MAME, Me Mind Y casts for high heat and chemistry well, and clearly has an effective process for building up physical comfort between their casts, because everyone brought so much enthusiasm to their scenes that they literally let Boss and Noeul take charge of their own bed scenes. During my watch, I praised the way they used angles to allow for some actor modesty, and it’s clear everyone had fun working with their partner. Truly something special. There is a lot to unpack with Love in the Air, and I don’t think it’s for everyone, but in terms of heat, the cast delivered.

Speaking of shows that didn’t really work for me, I wasn’t a fan of Big Dragon. That being said, ISBANKY and Mos were absolutely willing to go there physically with each other, and managed varying levels of emotion and intensity in their intimate scenes across the season. I didn’t want to end the year without acknowledging that.

As expected from Japan, they were about as chaste as I expect them to be outside of their darker BLs, but we have a few things worth mentioning. The final minutes of episode 4 of Old Fashion Cupcake was the most sexually charged interaction to come out of Japan all year, and I’m glad it happened between characters in their 30s and 40s.

I was proud of Minato’s Laundromat for delivering a satisfying pair of kisses in the finale, and confirming that the characters were finally getting it in in the final shot. We also got some solid bed work from Sora Inoue and Komiya Rio in Eternal Yesterday, but the fact that Koichi was dead probably excused that for Japan’s weird relationship with onscreen intimacy. Finally, we almost hit something really interesting about first desire in Takara-kun to Amagi-kun, but the show backed off and never went back.

While we’re talking about heat and Japan, I’m going to vent for the final time that the show was called Mr. Unlucky Has No Choice But to Kiss!” and yet they didn’t give a satisfying kiss! Something MBS kept experimenting with this year was having a dubcon or asymmetric emotional kiss very early in their shows, and then not delivering on a good couple one later. It felt a bit cheap and manipulative, and I’m quite glad we didn’t get that in Eternal Yesterday nor so far (as of episode 2) of Color Candy Paradox.

With Korea, this was as @absolutebl calls it, the year Korea learned that boys can kiss. We returned to To My Star 2 this year for a very messy BL that I loved for the chemistry between the leads. Hwang Da Seul did it twice with the pair in Blueming.

Watcha showed a willingness to go there with Semantic Error with the Parks that was a real relief after the forgettable kiss in Light on Me the previous year. Strongberry proved again why they’re one of the best with both couple dynamics in Choco Milk Shake, the Cherry Blossoms After Winter pair were willing to go there, and the branded pair from Kissable Lips did it twice this year with Roommates of Poongduck 304. Holland and Han Gi Chan did a decent job in Ocean Likes Me, which was significant for me because Holland is a Known Gay. Seriously, Korea came to play this year.

*NOTE: Because of the impacts of military occupation in the first half of the 20th century, I don’t often comment on Korea’s particular brand of kissing or heat levels. If they’re still sorting out how they want to be perceived when it comes to intimacy and romance, I’ve elected to stay out of that cultural conversation and praise what I enjoy only.

BL Got Political

Across the board, it felt like BL realized it could not longer remain politically neutral and remain relevant. Almost every Thai show went out of its way to call for marriage equality this year, with the standouts being Cutie Pie for its entire focus on marriage and Big Dragon with a memorable lament about the issue. From Japan, Cherry Magic: The Movie elegantly illustrated why marriage is so important for queer couples.

I want to highlight the shows that went a bit further and explored some queer themes beyond the ongoing struggle for marriage equality in Thailand.

In 21 Days Theory, we had a side plot where Q’s gay uncle traveled with Q’s mom to talk to their father off-screen about Man’s queerness and start rebuilding their relationship.

180 Degree Longitude Passes Through Us focused on the way bullying and internalized homophobia leave wounds that shatter the people connected to that trauma, and became one of my standout shows of the year.

My Only 12% asked what the value was in queer media that leaves queer people feeling sad and broken at the end by questioning the role of Love of Siam (2007) in our history.

Papa & Daddy 2 challenged the artifice of rainbow capitalism and how only an acceptable brand of queerness is allowed to make money.

DNA Says I Love You explored a section of the alphabet mafia that we rarely touch upon (I don’t want to spoil it).

Both Not Me and The Eclipse challenged the structures of Thai society.

Outside of BL, Koisenu Futari did not mince words in its demands that aromantic asexual people should not be forced to form procreative units for the sake of others happiness.

We accelerated rather quickly on this, but it’s good to see that the makers within the genre know the score.

The Summer ‘22 High School Extravaganza

Starting this summer, we were treated to an amazing series of shows exploring first love in high school with Minato’s Laundromat and Takara-kun & Amagi-kun from Japan; About Youth from Taiwan; 21 Days Theory, My Only 12%, and The Eclipse from Thailand. We didn’t let up into the fall with Eternal Yesterday, and the currently-airing My School President.

There were so many shows this year, but statistically, the high school shows made up such a small portion of the genre overall. I appreciated how all of these shows tackled the commonalities of coming of age.

With Minato’s Laundromat, we got to see Shin struggle against the barriers that said he couldn’t care for someone older than him, while Minato struggled with the way he’d refused to let himself mature from his own internalized homophobia.

We got to experience first desire and intense infatuation in Takara-kun to Amagi-kun, and how you’ll need the help of your friends to manage that intensity.

We had an absolutely adorable pair of couples falling in love in About Youth in the gentlest of these shows. Truly, this is a show so enjoyable that I have watched it more than once on my own.

My Only 12% explored the reality of falling in love with your best friend, and having them finally fall back years later as you also come to terms with your own queerness.

The Eclipse tackled the institutional and long-term effects of internalized homophobia across nine different characters and how they were all impacted by it.

21 Days Theory gave us a somewhat messy process of falling in love, but gave us support from a queer elder that let the show end up being shorter.

My School President is shaping into the much-needed successor to Lovesick and is turning Bad Buddy into a blueprint.

Finally, Eternal Yesterday tackled the grief of losing your first loved one unexpectedly to tragedy with a grace I think only Japan could pull off.

Yes, there were a lot of high school shows this year, but I think they were among the best offerings this year.

Ghosts! The Supernatural as Allegory for Grief

With BL reaching for higher concepts to stand out in the crowd, supernatural stories opened up spaces for shows to explore impossible romances and grief within the genre. I wrote extensively about how Eternal Yesterday tackled this, and how it is beneficial for some viewers to unpack their feelings. Even though I didn’t enjoy all of the shows I will mention in this section, I want to reiterate that I don’t ever want creators to stop trying to reach a strong thematic core with these supernatural concepts.

Thailand displayed a specific notion about posthumous bureaucracy in both Dear Doctor, I’m Coming For Soul, Something in My Room, and Ghost Host, Ghost House. All three of these shows expressed a ton of rules about the afterlife for ghosts that I couldn’t always track, but has felt specifically Thai. Ghost House stood out for me amongst these offerings with the way Kevin continued to mourn his friend who died in the US, and how the ghost of his friend continued to protect Kevin without his knowledge.Something in My Room ended up feeling like a weaker version of He’s Coming to Me (2019).

Japan relied on magical forces to draw people together in Mr. Unlucky Has No Choice But To Kiss! and Cherry Magic: The Movie. The yin and yang dynamics about unluckiness and luckiness led to a truly enjoyable pairing between the leads. Adachi not losing his powers until he was truly ready to connect to Kurosawa ended up being far more enjoyable than I expected. Meanwhile, in Korea, Color Rush 2 without one of the leads ultimately left the series feeling incomplete on a somewhat disappointing note.

Korea has had three different reincarnation stories this year with First Love, Again; Choco Milk Shake, and The Director Who Buys Me Dinner. Choco Milk Shake ends up being the weirdest, what with Jungwoo’s pets reincarnating as very hot human men to try and help him manage his loneliness. In the other two shows, one partner is either immortal or has full recollection of his previous lives as he tries to reconnect with the other partner.

Kissable Lips tried out vampires, mostly unsuccessfully. Without enough time, it didn’t get to explore some complex themes about long-lived beings. Interview With the Vampire will be the queer vampire show that gets remembered this year for the toxicity of their failed marriage and the abuses therein.

We had two different time loop shows with Triage from Thailand, and Once Again from Korea. I enjoyed Triage more for the way it showed how hard it is not to love someone when you become obsessed with them, but there was something special about the painful way Once Again doled out a sliver of hope.

Vice Versa managed to tell something interesting with the body swapping across universes concept, even if I found myself frustrated with one of the leads. Self also attempted to use the supernatural with a character losing his reflection, but it ultimately felt like a plot delivery shorthand.

Whew! For all the talk about the number of high school shows we got this year, we had more supernatural ones.

Finally: Adults to Take To Brunch

We had a lot of standout adults this year that I want to highlight. Inter-generational queer relationships are extremely important to me. No matter how loving and supportive families may be, most queer people are going to be raised by straight people. We have to venture out to find our people and each other. So, being able to find that within your family or within your own community is so important. As such, these are the characters from this year I’d want to take to brunch and hang out with.

My favorite pair this year are Cheep and Dej from My Ride. The breakfast they share with Mork and Tawan in episode 8 about how maintaining a long term relationship is not so much about amorous love and romance, but more about trust, commitment, and communication. The frankness with which they discuss how they don’t always get along, and yet continue to choose each other, was so stellar. I hope someday to have a love as durable as theirs.

I also want to mention Uncle Man in 21 Days Theory. I suspect the show introduced a gay uncle to accommodate its short run time. They needed a queer presence to explain Q’s familiarity with queerness, and Uncle Man’s advice and guidance saved us a lot of navel gazing as a character came to understand himself. Regardless, at one point in the show, Q gets jealous of Man because he thinks Man is flirting with X. Man pulls his nephew aside and reads him to pieces for being so irrational, and reminds Q that he’s not interested in boys. It was such a stellar moment that has stuck with me for months.

Framboise from Kabe Koji Nekoyashiki-kun Desires to be Recognized is probably my favorite character of the year. From his first appearance, he radiates queer self love and joy. He is so excited to be amongst his people and connect with them, and them to each other. He gives solid advice in the few interactions we had with him, and he’s so determined to make sure Mamouru joins in with other creators. I have so much more to say about him, but know that he is what I aspire to be. (Gif credit to @liyazaki, used with permission)

Alex from My Tooth Your Love needs to join us so he can have a break from holding the entire restaurant together. Alex may have been stern, but it was so fun to see a character set in where he was in his life while helping take care of others. He also deserves to be teased for being so fond of a baby gay.

Mama Xu from About Youth is also invited to the brunch. Not only has she managed to keep her son in good spirits after the painful loss of his father even as her brother terrorizes them, she also does that while staying out of his business.When Ye Guang came to her for advice about Qi Zhang, she kept her advice nonspecific enough that she didn’t invade their relationship. I love her, and she deserves to be pampered.

Though he had such a small role that they only named him Uncle, Uncle from Choco Milk Shake needs to join us because of the way he’s clearly supported his nephew without judgment for years, even knowing that a deep melancholy gripped him.

While talking about My Tooth Your Love, all of the 30-somethings that got together this year are welcome at brunch, including Xun’an and Bai Lang from My Tooth Your Love; Nomoto Yuki and Totoko Kasuga from She Loves to Cook, and She Loves to Eat; Togawa and Nozue from Old Fashion Cupcake; the entire adult cast of Papa & Daddy 2; Seo Joon and Ji Woo from To My Star 2; and the entire adult cast of Plus & Minus.

Lian and Yi from Cutie Pie are not invited because they are too wrapped up in the lives of young 20s folks and will bring the wrong energy to the brunch. Speaking of which, we’ve invited enough people that this has turned into a luncheon.

QL Got Jobs This Year

One of the real joys of being part of the genre for so long is seeing enough money enter the field that we can afford to leave the school settings. This year, we finally started seeing office romances more often.

Scrolling through my watch list reveals: 609 Bedtime Story, 180 Degree Longitude Passes Through Us, Accomplishment of Fudanshi Bartender, Candy Color Paradox, Check Out, Cherry Magic: The Movie, Choco Milk Shake, Close Friend S2, Coffee Melody, Dear Doctor I’m Coming for Soul, The Director Who Buys Me Dinner, Even Sun, First Love Again, Gameboys 2, GAP, Ghost Host Ghost House, Happy Ending Romance, Kabe Koji Nekoyashiki-kun Desire to be Recognized, KinnPorsche, Koisenu Futari, Love Stage!!, Meow Ears Up, My Ride, My Tooth Your Love,The New Employee, Ocean Likes Me, Oh! Boarding House, Oh! My Assistant, Old Fashion Cupcake, On Cloud Nine, Physical Therapy, Plus & Minus, Rainbow Prince, Roommates of Poongduck 304, Senpai This Can’t be Love!, She Loves to Cook and She Loves to Eat, Sleep With Me, Sky in Your Heart, Tinted With You, That’s My Candy, To My Star 2, Triage, To Sir With Love, The Tuxedo, Vice Versa, War of Y, and What Zabb Man!.

That’s 47 shows; that’s more than half my watch list. We can talk about how much stuff happens in school settings, but we had some options this year!

In a real relief for me, we started to see more workplace romances or romances starting between adults. Early in the year it started with My Ride for me, and then the slate of Korean shows. I suspect it comes down to where it was pragmatic to shoot. In Seoul, there’s probably office space for rent for these sorts of productions because of kdrama, whereas Thailand seems to have a disused campus that hosts many of the shows. Still, I count at least 16 that involve people falling for people they work with.

A special note for the Philippines: Rainbow Prince was fantastic. Yes, the production values are way lower than most people’s tastes, but that show was so funny. They absolutely committed to being the first BL musical, and the songs are a ton of fun. That show has “a heart so big it could crush this town.” It even does the classic musical thing of giving an antagonist one of the better songs on the set.

Looking at the projects being advertised next year, we might see non-school shows take the vast majority. What a time for us!

The College Shows That Didn’t Suck

Where I found that the high school shows have done a fantastic job this year, the college shows were really hit or miss for me. I’m not sure if it’s because that particular setting has run out of intriguing ideas, but I want to highlight the shows that I think didn’t suck.

First up: Thailand. You’re My Sky felt like the first true post-ITSAY pulp. They really reached for solid production values and tried to bring a higher level of cinematography. I also think they handled the three relationships really well. Many folks dropped it, but it was a quiet gem of this year for me. Cutie Pie was a bit of a slog sometimes, but I still recommend it. Mark and Vee are not my favorite pairing, but the new version of Love Mechanics was still well done. It needed a side couple though.

Next: Japan. Despite my gripes, Mr. Unlucky Has No Choice But To Kiss! was actually a really fun watch. Obviously we can’t end a year without acknowledging the continued parody fun of Absolute BL 2.

Finally: Korea. Semantic Error is going to be one of the banner shows of this year when we refer back to this year and talk about how people got into BL, what with the way it brought K-pop fans into the genre. Blueming gave us another stellar entry from Hwang Da Seul (To My Star). While I don’t really enjoy stepbrothers pairings, Cherry Blossoms After Winter was compelling. Love Class held its own, even if it wasn’t exactly to my taste.

Finally, though it isn’t exactly a school show, DNA Says I Love You is a really special show from Taiwan worth checking out.

LET’S GO LESBIANS! We Finally Had Multiple Quality GL Offerings

We finally started seeing GL productions on the field. Surprisingly, Korea has had the most offerings. I’ve watched She Makes My Heart Flutter and Our Relationship Ended Before it Began. My favorite pieces so far are Sleep With Me and GAP.

Sleep With Me worked so well because of the way they focused on disability and how it impacts romance. The queerness mattered to the storytelling, but it doesn’t spend much time in angst about that, when their material concerts are so much more present. I’ve been shouting for months for more people to watch it, so please sign up on Gaga and watch it. You can check out the first episode on YouTube.

GAP is still airing, but oh my goodness am I having fun with the costuming on this show. There is a specific lesbian gaze to this show that has been so refreshing to experience. It’s even unlocked all new tropes with us with “let me put this lipstick on you so I can taste it.”

She Loves to Cook, and She Loves to Eat feels like the lesbian little sister to What Did You Eat Yesterday? Unlike WDYEY, the pair are not together at the beginning, but it has been a darling of a show that I really hope NHK continues next year. I do love the shows where everyone cooks.

In Koisenu Futari, we got to see two aromantic asexual people build a platonic support system together while dealing with a lot of unwanted allosexual scrutiny. This was one of the most vital things I watched this year.

While there aren’t a ton of offerings yet, it’s been an encouraging start.

Meanwhile, In the West

Though it pains me how many Western fans of queer media will not cross over into BL, there were some things from the West I enjoyed this year.

Closest to BL, I enjoyed Heartstopper and Young Royals. Both fit into the same coming of age space BL loves and were easy recommendations for people who enjoy high school romance.

Probably my favorite show was Chucky. That the Chucky character has been terrorizing victims across five decades is amazing, and I’ve enjoyed how some of the queer themes always at the core of the series are now front and center. A young romance between two boys undergirds much of the drama of the first two seasons, and it's a rare American show that became appointment television for me.

The biggest surprise of the year for me came from HBO with Our Flag Means Death. Obviously, we all know that pirates are gay culture, but I was not expecting HBO to be this explicit and play a textual romance out between Rhys Darby and Taika Waititi as Stede Bonnet and Blackbeard respectively. It also featured an explicit open relationship between two other crewmembers, and had a clearly nonbinary character aboard as well. All of this is handled with a comedic grace that felt so easy.

Also distributed by HBO is the Canadian show Sort Of, in which a trans-nonbinary nanny deals with the fallout of one of the parents falling into a coma. I first saw it at TIFF 2021, and it is really just so good. It’s hard to really sell in text like this, but it’s a fantastic show.

Finally, of what I watched, AMC gave us an adaptation of Interview With the Vampire, that shows a gay romance souring into something truly toxic over decades. I had a few qualms with specific choices the team made, but this show was absolutely compelling.

While I’m impressed with a few of the offerings we have here, I’m still not sold on Western queer storytelling funded by the major distribution systems.

So…What’s Next?

That’s the real question, isn’t it? I think, for me, I’m going to have to be more discerning next year. Watching this much stuff really isn’t sustainable for me anymore, and it means I’m going to have to pick my winners, because I find I have little time to catch up on shows. I also enjoy the week-to-week interaction about shows too much to be late to the party.

Overall, I’m genuinely encouraged by what I’ve seen teased so far for next year. GMMTV is getting more confident in its post-school storytelling, and is doubling down on using veteran talent instead of newbies to lead their shows. With their original stable starting to age up, they’re trying out more high-concept stuff. The Midnight Series begins airing this week, and I think will be our first glimpse of what’s to come.

Beyond GMMTV, Star Hunter Entertainment and Domundi seem like they’re going to hold strong for the coming year. Me Mind Y also doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. That means we’ll be covered on high heat and genre stories as well. Finally, Wayufilm is still active, so we’ll continue to see them experiment.

Unfortunately, I don’t see Korea taking a big leap forward yet. They seem satisfied with the 20 minutes max for their shows and at most 8 episodes. Still, I expect them to dominate the low-heat shows that focus exclusively on romance.

I’m not sure what to expect from Japan after this year of BL o’clock ends for MBS. My only hope is that the relationships with GagaOOlala and Viki don’t end, and what new productions do come out Japan make it onto both platforms.

I worry about the Philippines getting too walled in. I haven’t been able to watch a production from The IdeaFirst Company easily in a very long time, and I don’t know what’s going on with their international distribution anymore. I’m still watching to watch Pa Thirsty and Two and One. I have hopes for Oxin Films’ next productions, but they always seem to be working on a thin budget that delays their projects.

I’ve also fallen off of Vietnamese productions for now. The fundraising pushes are too much for me.

That’s all from me. It’s been the most enjoyable year in BL I’ve ever had, and maybe all of queer media. It’s so fun seeing different kinds of BL fans in the space now find their niches, and to see fandom wars moving off my dashboard as people find other people to engage with instead. We passed supersaturation a long time ago, so I hope the bubble doesn’t burst any time soon.

See you all next year!

#bl end of year wrap up #bl series #thai bl #taiwanese bl #japanese bl #korean bl #pinoy bl #Ben watches

101 notes · View notes

handeaux · 8 months

Text

Cincinnatian James Ruggles Created A “Universal Language” But No One Listened

Cincinnati in 1829 overflowed with excitement. Our little river town had grown to a total population of more than 24,000. General Andrew Jackson made a brief stop here as he journeyed up the Ohio River on his way to inauguration as President of the United States. Frances “Fanny” Trollope scribbled notes for what would become her scandalous exposé, “Domestic Manners of the Americans.” Over the course of a week, witnessed by thousands, Rev. Alexander Campbell of the Disciple Church defended Christianity from the assaults of Robert Owen, founder of New Harmony, Indiana, and fervid apostate, who argued that all religions were false.

Hardly noticed in all the hubbub was the publication of a slim volume by Cincinnati printer James Ruggles proposing the adoption of a universal language. In the intellectual ferment of the early Nineteenth Century, Ruggles’ proposal gained so little traction that he is all but forgotten today.

It is interesting that Ruggles had his book published by Cincinnati printers John McCalla and Samuel Davis, because Ruggles himself was a printer and a publisher himself. Born in New York in 1795, Ruggles married a woman named Henrietta Disher and relocated to Steubenville, Ohio and then moved to Cincinnati. While here, he published a magazine called Ladies’ Museum which, according to an advertisement [29 January 1831],

“Embraced in its general subjects, Original and Selected Poetry, Tales, Notices and Reviews of New Works, Natural History, Sketches of Biography and History, Reports of Fashions, occasional articles relating to the culture of Plants Fruits and Flowers, with such Intelligence, Anecdotes, chastened effusions of Wit, Sentiment, and Humor, as will impart variety and furnish an agreeable miscellany.”

Although not identified as such in the city directory, James Ruggles was also apparently a teacher of some sort, although whether he taught in a private capacity or in the nascent public schools of the city is unknown. In Isaac M. Martin’s 1900 history of the schools of Cincinnati, Ruggles is listed among the “Teachers Who Have Become Authors.”

Martin’s book lists only Ruggles’ “Universal Language” among his publications, but an 18 November 1829 advertisement in the Ohio Monitor revealed that Ruggles was trying to attract enough subscribers to publish a series of books titled “The American Literary Preceptor,” which he described as:

“A complete system of tuition for American youths, containing all the branches of learning necessary, in forming the education of an American citizen – commencing with the first rudiments, spelling, reading, &c. and including those proper, as the foundation of a complete scientific and ornamental education, suitable for fitting one to enter a profession, or any useful occupation; to be comprised in about 15 volumes.”

The advertisement for the textbook series – there is no evidence any of the books were ever published – boasted of Ruggles’ role as the author of the book on universal language.

So, what was the “universal language” developed by James Ruggles? And why was it ignored by pretty much everybody? To begin with, Ruggles’ universal language was almost impossible to read and equally impossible to pronounce. Here is a sample:

“Kertholson sjtilmagpxl fjnhxl lokzturs, deksztxns fakhornpxs, karfzturps vovszdxrap, punkzpurapsdux kirkztur, rolsilnxmszdxrapdui.”

That tangled mess of consonantal gibberish may be translated as:

“To ascertain the relative situation and size of places, references are made on maps to direction, or the points of a compass, and to latitude and longitude.”

According to Ruggles, his universal language was superior to any previously proposed because it was:

“Founded on the clearness of its combinations – the simplicity of its construction, the uniformity and invariableness of its rules – and, especially, the facility and speed with which it can be acquired, of being universally adopted by the civilized world.”

The heart of Ruggles’ artificial language was simplicity. All plurals were formed by adding an s – none of this mouse/mice, goose/geese malarkey. Each vowel and consonant was pronounced uniquely to avoid homonymic rhymes like scoff-cough. Most root words were derived from Latin, so his word for “judge” was “prqt” from the Latin praetor, and his word for “stone” was “lap” from the Latin lapis.

Despite his obsession with simplicity and uniformity, the end result was so alien and complicated that none of the many literary magazines at the time paid it the slightest attention. Part of Ruggles’ problem was marketing. He never named his invention, referring to it only as “The Universal Language.” Later creators of Volapuk and Esperanto had better luck. Ruggles sent advance copies to scholars and celebrities, none of whom had anything particularly favorable to say about his Universal Language – but he published their responses in the back of his book anyway! Typical was this polite dismissal from John Quincy Adams, who found time despite his duties as President of the United States to respond on 27 July 1827:

“Sir: I return herewith, conformably to your request, the Plan of a Universal Language, which was enclosed with your letter of 28th May. An opinion long since formed, unfavorable to all projects of this character, has perhaps influenced that formed with regard to yours. From the examination, necessarily superficial, which I have been able to give it, I consider it creditable to your ingenuity. Respectfully, your fellow-citizen. J.Q. Adams.”

In other words, “I am opposed to the whole idea of a universal language, but your scheme indicates some level of imagination.”

For reasons unknown but probably involving money or the lack thereof, Ruggles uprooted his wife and sons and left Cincinnati around 1831. He reappeared in Edwardsville, Illinois near the banks of the Mississippi River in 1838 as the editor of a local newspaper with a decidedly unusual mission. According to the 1882 “History of Madison County, Illinois”:

“The Western Weekly Mirror was established at Edwardsville by James Ruggles in May, 1838. He was editor and proprietor. The Mirror was devoted to the introduction and propagation of a universal language by which the whole human family could hold converse with one another and be understood. It was a worthy mission, but the feeble effort of its progenitor fell stillborn. It continued until the spring of 1840, when its name was changed to the Sovereign People. It continued until the summer of 1841, when it suspended.”

James Ruggles died of congestive fever on 17 October 1844 in Edwardsville. He left no will, but his wife appealed to the local authorities to become adminstratrix of his estate, which she testified amounted to less than $300.

#james ruggles #universal language #volupak #Esperanto

22 notes · View notes

absolutebl · 2 years

Text

BL Coming in August

Here’s what’s starting this month. Which ones are you excited about? My top picks for me as The Eclipse and About Youth, let’s see how wrong I am.

THAILAND

War of Y

From COPY A BANGKOK (trailer)

20 eps (holy fucktard, 20 episodes of Cheewin’s nonsense), starts Aug 2 on AisPlay premium

On Cloud Nine

Country setting, atmospheric LTR flavored BL with themes of self acceptance from MindTrio (trailer).

6 eps, starts Aug 6 on Mind Trio’s YT channel

21 Days Theory

Friends to lovers, self acceptance, secret crush, high school set from Rookie Thailand (trailer). Looks high angst, messy, cheating, secret crush stars Bever (En of Love: TOSSARA, En of Love: Love Mechanics, The Best Story and Love Mechanics) and Tee Khunakorn (The Cupid Coach).

8 eps, starts Aug 7 on Rookie Thailand’s YT channel (I think)

The Eclipse

An enemies to lovers high school set, paladin bab boy pairing from GMMTV. This is right in their wheelhouse and was my most anticipated from GMMTV’s 2022 line up. Tropes include: sinister boarding school, haze the one you love, suspense & horror elements looks great, dark (but in a way Thailand can handle), kind of Blacklist-ish meets Great Men Academy. GMMTV excels at this kind of content. Stars First (The Shipper, Not Me) & Khaotung (Tonhon Chonlatee) side dish pair from FUTS NeoLouis. I actually really like this lead pair and I think they can handle the content. trailer

12 eps, starts Aug 12 on GMMTV’s Youtube channel

* I’m gonna point out an important thing. I find it notable that Khaotung as the aggressor/bad boy (for a change) in this GMMTV offering has his natural skin tone (aka darker) as opposed to when he’s playing a super uke role (see Tonhon Chonlatee). Now there could be mitigating factors (like the makeup people got better at matching base tones, or they were shooting outside a lot), but still Thailand’s propensity for associating negative/evil/poor/crazy characters with darker skin tones is so painful and so insidious I want everyone to notice this, especially when we see it being carried out on THE SAME actor by THE SAME production team.

And yes, Korea does this too.

My Only 12%

Friends to lovers, high school set, high angst, sunshine/sunshine pairing from Studio Wabi Sabi for iQIyI. (trailer) Neighbors and childhood friends, Cake & Seeiw, who have totally opposite personalities slowly growing apart. This one has the chemistry and the script so fingers crossed it’s not sad. Y-novel adaptation (author Afterday - Bad Buddy) starring SantaEarth (7 Project).

Do we trust Studio Wabi Sabi or director New anymore? Even with SantaEarth (especially with SantaEarth). That is the question.

Aug 12, 15 eps on iQIYI

180 Degree Longitude Passes Through Us

Coming to Gaga (trailer). Doesn’t look like BL: “Can a mother be more understanding of her son’s sensuality? Even if she does, will it be easy for her to accept his relationship with a man twice his age?”

? eps, starts Aug 15 on GaGa

Love in the Air

Enemies to Lovers, high school set from Me Mindy (trailer). Mame’s upcoming adaptation of her novels Love Storm and Love Sky, focuses on 2 couples and their individual storylines.

10 eps, starts Aug 18 on ?

Ghost Host, Ghost House is supposed to be coming too.

TAIWAN

Papa & Daddy 2 AKA Papa and Daddy Season 2

Gaga bringing us the second season (trailer). Starring Melvin Sia (Damian) and Chiu Mu Han (new actor as Jerry). Looks messy.

6 eps, starts Aug 8 (Taiwan's Father's Day) on GaGa

About Youth AKA I Secretly Fell in Love with Student Council President

Enemies to lovers, high school set for CHOCO TV to air on Bilibili (no trailer) from the producers of HIStory 2&3, and Tsai Mi Chieh the director of H1: Stay Away From Me; H2: Crossing the Line; H3: MODC; Love Is Science (we like her). Adapted from the novel Secretly by Huang Si Mi about high school boys with different backgrounds, personalities, and values who compete for student president, but have more attraction than animosity. The drama focuses on two storylines: egocentric elite student Ye Guang who fights in the council elections with a quiet guitarist Xu Qi Zhang, and his friend Ray who after a recent breakup up with his boyfriend meets A Jian.

10 eps, starts Aug 29 on Bilibili

JAPAN

Takara and Amagi AKA Takara-kun and Amagi-kun AKA Takara-kun to Amagi-kun

Opposites attract, secret love high school popular/geek pairing from MBS (no trailer). Same studio as Mr Unlucky and Senpai, so expect that style. A popular guy and an outcast boy start dating in secret. Stars Jpop Idols Arata Sato (IMPACTors) as Takara and Nao Oriyama (Shonen Ninja) as Amagi.

8 eps, starts Aug 18 on ?

Interesting that there isn’t anything from Korea and nothing new for Viki this month. Although give them a chance, they drop suddenly and later sometimes.

I don’t always know where to find these and remember your territory and accessibility may be different than mine. But drop a comment if you have more info.

180 notes · View notes

pro-xy · 2 years

Text

I stumbled upon the pilot of I feel you linger in the air and no, I’m not fine and I don’t think I’ll ever be again

#why does the universe hate me #first 180 degree longitude ending in total heartbreak then this..all I know is pain #i feel you linger in the air #thai bl #personal

3 notes · View notes

janesgms · 5 months

Text

kinda random but i have asteroid tantalus at FORTY ONE DEGREES of declination???? i'm shocked lol that's so out of orb it's crazy - side note: the right term is out of bound but i have an habit of calling it out of orb including my older posts lmao. just for you to have a notion: my asteroid tantalus is conjuncting my other asteroid young with a 0° orb and my asteroid young is in the 23° degree of declination (out of orb too)

in case you don't know, declination is the measure of a planet/angle/object's latitude - apart from the flat plane we see our chart usually when it shows the normal degrees that is measuring the longitude - in this perspective is represented projected through the ecliptic equator of earth. this is a vertent of astrology that's pretty cool to analyse and it helped me a lot to fill my chart researches.

with declination, we can mainly look at the two "missing" aspects: parallel and contral-parallel, the first has the effect of a conjunction but with only the positive traits (which i presonally consider kind of a trine but a lil bit stronger specially if tight) and the latter has the same effect of an opposition but not as strong.

now about the out of bound (or out of orb like i like to say but i know is wrong 😭) part, is basically the degree of declinations of planets/angles/objects that are further from the maximal declination of the sun (23°26'), and this gives them a totally different energy that can be both good and bad. i'm gonna detail this on other post maybe... so guys, 41° is really wild lmaooo specially considering what tantalus represents. for you guys to have another notion, my boy's tantalus is in the same sign of mine really close to it but its declination is 4° 💀

anyways let's end with the praying bart because if my theory is right then the hole is way downer then i thought. actually i'm thinking of so many theories about this matter lately and i'm anxious to do so but scared of people's reactions to be honest, i just need to put my thoughts in order inside my head first and read a little more so let's be patient with myself

obs: please if you do not believe or study or whatever with declinations and anything on here, just pass ahead, i am not trying to force anything of what i believe to anyone and i am not a professional. i'm just doing it as a hobbie and because i have fun doing this, i love gathering knowledge about this and i do believe in this matter, it makes sense to me, but i totally respect who doesn't and you should respect me. and remember: many of astrology is unknown and a mystery, and it doesn't matter for how many years you've studied and read, you'll never know everything and you'll never be the absolute truth. the key to astrology is having an open mind and trying to see beyond the surface and the obvious or the stereotypes sorry for the ranting lol

#astrology #tantalus #asteroid #declination #out of orb #astro observations #astro notes #astrology notes #astrology observations

16 notes · View notes

yeetlegay · 2 years

Note

Thank you so much for posting about 180 Degrees Longitude Passes Through Us!!!!!!! It's insanely good and would have gone totally under my radar. I thought KinnPorsche had insane chemistry but Holy Shit these guys!?!!??!?! How do they create so much sexual tension through eye contact alone!!?!!??!! And since literally the first time they look at each other the tension has not broken once!!!!!!!!! When they kiss, I'm going to spontaneously combust, but it's worth it.

THEY JUST! THEY'RE OUT HERE! GAZING! IT'S INSANE!

#I need them to act together again and this time I need them to FUCK #don't even give them a script they got this just put them in a room and let god do his work #180 degree longitude passes through us #yeetle asks #why don’t queue stay

60 notes · View notes

sky-squido · 1 year

Text

Where in the World is the Kindgom of Hyrule? PART ONE

Alright buckle up, friends—this one’s gonna get absolutely, utterly, wildly out of hand very quickly.

Section One: The Dream

So recently, someone made the mistake of teaching me how to navigate celestially and we were talking about all the differences between how the sky behaves in the northern and southern hemispheres and I, proudly having absolutely nothing inside of my brain except for LinkedUniverse for almost two and a half years now, thought to myself: hey! Wouldn’t it be funny if one of the LU boys was from the southern hemisphere and all the others had never left the northern hemisphere? The first boy to pop into my head for this was Wind because he, being a sailor, would almost definitely have the best grasp on celestial out of the whole gang and that way he could use a bunch of nautical navigation terms when he freaks out and nobody would have any idea what he’s saying.

I mean, imagine, right, he gets to another Hyrule and he’s got this navigation stuff down pat and while you could do celestial navigation without knowing the earth is round (as far as I can tell, we have no indication the Mayans or Polynesians knew the earth was round, but they were epic celestial navigators), knowing the earth is round is really very handy and we’ve known the darned thing’s circumference for literal millennia. So, since Wind clearly has latitude and longitude lines on his map and those are defined by angles around the earth’s curvature (none of those lines are curved though, so smh my head Wind uses the Mercator projection (to be fair, most navigators do, too, because it makes drawing rhumb lines really easy, but I digress)), homeboy knows the earth is round. And also, I mean, have you seen the Wii U box art?

Anyway, my point is that a southern hemisphere Wind would know that a northern hemisphere exists he and could totally logically deduce how stuff would behave there, but that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t freak him the FRICK out, especially before he fully figured out what was going on, because supposedly, he’s still in Hyrule, just an earlier one, and he was right above Hyrule, so how the heck could this be in a different hemisphere?

It was at this point that I realized why my fun little idea wouldn’t work—they’re all from Hyrule. It’s the same place, just at different times, and so, if the Kingdom of Hyrule has any internal logic or consistency, it’s all just gonna be the same place so my silly joke wouldn’t make sense.

But then, I realized, the Kingdom of Hyrule doesn’t have any internal logic or consistency! Not only does the map’s basic geography change quite dramatically between games, but it’s full of locations that are quite explicitly meant to be the same ones from prior games, yet their relative positions to each other vary wildly (believe me, we are going to get to this).

Fortunately, we know a truly, insanely, staggeringly massive amount of time has passed between games. I mean, Wild’s Hyrule has lore that, ten thousand years ago, Calamity Ganon got yeeted by tech we don’t even remotely recognize from any of the earlier games, meaning all the other eras are far older than that. For context, 10,000 years from today humans were just starting to figure out how farming worked. If Nintendo is going to casually throw a ten thousand year long timeskip into their silly little timeline, then maybe we can account for all this wacky location shifting with some clever geographical wrangling. I mean, the kingdom of Hyrule is and always has been a big hot mess and if magic exists, ten thousand years is an acceptable amount of time to toss around between games, and *stares pointedly at Tears of the Kingdom trailers* then maybe we can reconcile all of this.

Section Two: The Little Adventure

I really like that phrase, “little adventure.” I’ve started using it whenever something mundane goes wrong or unexpectedly somehow, like “I’m going to have to walk a whole mile to get back home and it’s raining and I forgot my umbrella? Welp, guess it’s time for a little adventure!”

Yeah, that’s an apt phrase to use here, I think.

Because, like, okay, I know 10k years is like no time at all, geologically, so mountain ranges aren’t popping up and scooting away willy nilly, but we’ve gotta account for canon-typical shenaniganery. So generally, we have Hyrule castle in the middle, a volcanoes somewhere up, a sand somewhere left, and a woods somewhere right (I refrain from using such terms as north, east, south, and west because while the maps all have little compass roses on them and there are compasses in the games, magnetic-true variation is a very big deal, the magnetic poles wiggle around and even fully reverse sometimes, and I have my reservations about trusting Hyrule’s royal cartographers too much. Very soon, you will too). Because even that basic outline of Hyrule is subject to change. Take Twilight Princess, for example. Even if you use the GameCube version, where Gerudo Desert is to the left of the castle, like it should be, Death Mountain is to the right of the castle, not up. Since the forest is straight down, though, we could just be like “oh lol whoops guess the magnetic pole took a hike, let’s just rotate the map an entire forty-five degrees because the Kingdom of Hyrule decides to make all of its maps using magnetic north for some unholy reason.” And I mean, that’s fair game, right? Sure.

This strategy doesn’t hold up for very long.

I mean, I’m looking at broad trends here, right. I’m already assuming nothing is drawn to scale (and they clearly aren’t to scale even when the maps are literally rips of the world like for Legend’s games because I refuse to believe that Hyrule Castle and Kakariko village account for one-quarter of Hyrule’s land area). We’ve all seen those ridiculously inaccurate old maps from ages ago in our own history—there’s a lot of room for error here. I’m already assuming every distance and position and landform is an artistic abstraction and I’m also generously overcompensating for hardware limitations and the fact that Nintendo did not know they were going to try and connect all of these games decades later and was just focused on making fun, interesting, stand-alone adventures. You can keep building your one town in different locations with completely different architectural styles but give it the same name every time just to be cute. You can rebuild your castle regularly in all sorts of different spots without leaving any trace of the original. The Lost Woods can just grow legs and run around wherever they want to because the whole point of the Lost Woods is that the rules of space and object permanence don’t apply to them. We can throw around ten thousand years like it’s nothing. I’m trying to be as charitable as humanly possible. I literally do not care about the minutiae I literally just want the barest, vaguest outline of what the heck this landmass is doing on only the broadest of scales. I want this to work. I’m ignoring virtually everything about the terrain at this point, only using the locations that are canonically the same ones as from other games and allowing for incredible amounts of drift in where these things physically are.

But like—Breath of the Wild insisted on being cute and having that statue of Hylia that ended up in the Sealed Grounds in Skyward Sword be buried in the Forgotten Temple. Nice! Why is it in the top-left corner of the map?! What’s that, Hyrule just expanded out in a different direction and most of Skyward Sword takes place farther to the left than this map shows? Cute, but the Sacred Springs, clearly designed specifically to be the same ones from Skyward Sword, are all along the right side of the map! Like, sure, maybe the Skyview Spring being the Spring of Courage in Faron Woods all checks out and the second spring is in Eldin and Akkala is pretty close to Eldin, so fine, Spring of Power gets a free pass. And, again, we can fudge stuff—Skyward Sword’s map is for artistic purposes, not navigation, so maybe it’s only vaguely accurate. There’s some nebulous unmapped space between Faron and Eldin and we can just… assume there’s mountains there and that whatever pre-Skyward Sword civilization was kicking around building these things tossed a spring up there and Zelda just ~didn’t have to go there~ to get her Goddess powers back because we never saw the Spring of Wisdom in Skyward Sword. Fine.

Maybe the massive Goddess Statue and Sealed-Grounds-looking temple up in Tabantha are just a different temple in a similar style. Fine, okay, and Breath of the Wild and Skyward Sword are the most incomprehensively far apart of any of these games—clearly the only reason the springs survived this long was the fact that they’re sacred.

[Digression time! It’s time for a little adventure where I ramble about the Sacred Springs! It’s not really relevant, but it sure is neat!]

Because if the same springs are in both Skyward Sword and Breath of the Wild, that then implies that they were lurking around in every other era but, acknowledging real life chronology issues, obviously these springs weren’t in the previous games. If we’re willing to ignore cold hard canon to pretend this is a world that really exists, though, which is way more fun, then those springs should still exist and that would be a really fun thing to have the boys stumble upon! Just in case any enterprising fic authors were looking for neat ideas I can tell you where they are, but where they all fall depends on how you decide to line up the maps. As previously established, there’s buckets of drift and inaccuracy, and I’ll get into my own mega-compilation-map after this digression is over, but if you want to just vibe and just stick to the general area and biome (like Nintendo themselves) here’s how you do it:

Courage goes in any forest in the bottom or right, power goes in any hot mountain at the top or the right, and the center of the rightmost part of a Zelda map—the part between the volcano and the forest—is always either unmapped somehow or contains at least one significant area of higher elevation, so just slap the Spring of Wisdom there. It even works for Minish Cap! If you wanna play really fast and loose with exact locations of things and the border of the kingdom and also completely ignore the castle, as I’ve been doing, Minish Cap’s map is just the righthand side of Hyrule rotated like forty-five degrees. Hot mountain up, water to the right, green in the middle and the bottom right. Works out nicely with Skyward Sword to have Lake Hylia there in the forest on the right instead of at the center bottom, and Veil Falls and the Cloud Tops could fall right in that unmapped space between Eldin and Faron, so that’s totally a valid spot to put the Spring of Widsom. (there’s actually a lot of unmapped space in Zelda games once you start looking for it and having fics take place in those areas where the boys can then stumble upon relics of older eras would actually be so badass I’d actually love to see that happen in fics).

For Ocarina of Time, the Spring of Courage would be in the Kokiri Forest or Lost Woods, up to you, Power goes up on Death Mountain, and Wisdom’s in Zora’s River/Domain. For Wind Waker, you can put Courage in the Forest Haven, Power in either Dragon Roost or Fire Mountain, and Wisdom can go on any island between the two or just end up underwater for a hot minute (it’s not like that’s gonna ruin it—it’s supposed to be wet). For aLttP/ALBW, Courage goes down by Lake Hylia, Power’s up on Death Mountain again, and if you don’t want to use Zora’s Domain, we can retcon that the Spring of Wisdom wasn’t in Zora’s Domain in Time’s era, it was in that little unmapped sliver between Zora’s Domain and the foresty area, so now we can slap the spring of Wisdom somewhere around or just past the right side of the Eastern Palace/Eastern Ruins. Isn’t this fun? For Twilight Princess, we already have sacred springs, but these are different ones—by now it’s probably been a few geological epochs since Skyward Sword, so they’re allowed to make some new springs. The old ones still have to be kicking around, though, and Twilight Princess’ map has a delightful amount of uncharted territory so we can toss them in Faron, Eldin, and that mysterious space directly between the two of them.

[Okay, digression over!]

I mean, this is fun, and if the vague suggestion of similar biomes is all we needed to line up all these maps into one cohesive Hyrule, that would be great. But it’s not. There are a few locations that absolutely must line up across games, and they ruin everything. Like, okay, I’m going to start sounding completely feral with rage, but I’m not actually mad at Nintendo. They’re making good games and I’m trying to do something very silly to their games and I knew it wouldn’t work out before I even started. I’m just so incredibly theatrically frustrated by how close it is to actually working until some random detail gets thrown in and it’s always exactly the one thing that would break everything.

Let’s start with some neat ones that do kind of work, though. Positivity! We know that, in Wind Waker, Hyrule Castle and the Deku Tree are the same ones as in Ocarina of Time. If we overlay the maps so these two points line up, we see that Wind Waker is so much bigger than Ocarina of Time and I love that. The ocean should be huge, way bigger than the kingdom, and that means we can end up playing with some navigational stuff, it’s just that Wind won’t be the one freaking out, everyone else will be, because if they go to the right spot in his era, they’ll be dealing with weird latitudes they’re not used to (yeah, remember when this essay was about celestial navigation? Me neither). The only problem here is that to get them to line up, you have to rotate them. So yeah, magnetic north can just trek forty-five degrees to the right and everyone will ignore this fact and continue to make maps in magnetic north for some reason. This is fine.

Honestly, the most consistent feature of Hyrule is the volcanic hotspot. There’s always one there, it’s almost always in a comparable spot, and unlike deserts, which can totally change over pretty short periods of time, hotspots are very reliable and locationally stable irl. I mean, even as the continental plates shift, the hotspot doesn’t. That’s why Hawai’i is shaped the way it is—the hotspot sprouts a volcano, the plates move, it sprouts another, rinse and repeat until you’ve drawn a little line of lava across the ocean. So if we line up all the volcanic areas over the Hylian Hot Spot and do only the minimal amount of rotation necessary to get everything else to roughly align, we can draw some cool connections.

For example, we established how Wind Waker and Ocarina of Time’s Hyrules align. But then in Wind Waker there’s a side quest where you plant a bunch of new Deku sprouts to help spread the forest. If we line up the volcanic hotspots between Breath of the Wild’s map and Wind Waker’s, we can scoot and pivot around and match up all the seedlings to see which one most likely started the line that Breath of the Wild’s Deku Tree comes from (because again, ten thousand years). It’s the Deku Sprout on Eastern Fairy Island! That… actually works out shockingly well. North is the same between Wind Waker and Breath of the Wild and even Hyrule castle is in the right spot! I also love how Breath of the Wild’s world is only a little bigger than Ocarina of Time’s and Wind Waker dwarfs the both of them—that’s absolutely correct; you cover so much more ground sailing than on foot. Why the magnetic pole shifted more in the few centuries between Ocarina of Time and Wind Waker (so much of Old Hyrule is still alive so I refuse to believe it’s been more than a thousand years between the two of them) than it did in the canonical OVER TEN THOUSAND YEARS between Wind Waker and Breath of the Wild baffles me, but hey, maybe the magnetic pole yeeting across the earth’s surface is a side-effect of Ganon taking power, however briefly. But wait, then shouldn’t it have shifted again in Breath of the Wild, since he won for a minute there? Augh whatever.

Okay, you may be wondering why I’m making such a fuss about where north is on these maps. After all, directions are relative and constructs and it was convention to put south at the tops of maps for a lot of people at different times and places. Yes, that’s all correct and I really wouldn’t have the slightest problem with any which orientation if they didn’t say north ON THE MAP!! And locations have names like “east” and “west” and they’ll say “go south of—” and these are not abstractions! North means closer to one of the axes around which the earth turns, around which the stars and sun and planets revolve. Moving up and down along a given line between these two poles means you’re on a given line of longitude so the sun always reaches its highest point at the same time, east and west mean along lines of constant latitude, where the sun’s highest point on any given day is the same—these directions are not arbitrarily defined!! You can’t just decide to put north somewhere else! You can have true north (the direction to the geographic north pole, the place where all lines of longitude converge and the sun goes around the horizon in a circle on the equinoxes, making a 24 hour sunset, and the pole star stands still overhead) and magnetic north (the place where magnetic compasses point, which is different than true north and moves kind of a surprising amount, but is only really relevant because compasses point there and also the auroras are centered on them too, which is cool), and that’s it! Those are the norths!! Don’t make up new norths!!!

And I said magnetic north moves, and it does, like 25 miles a year, and if we’re dealing with the timescale of thousands of years, that’s gonna add up.

SO WHY ARE YOU MAKING YOUR MAPS USING MAGNETIC NORTH?! NOBODY USES MAGNETIC NORTH TO DRAW MAPS—magnetic north, as previously established, moves a lot and you don’t want to have to redraw all your maps every year! Why would you do that instead of using the permanent geographical constant that’s easier to calculate because you can use the definite motion of the stars that can be measured to a fraction of a minute (up to a half mile of accuracy anywhere in the globe!) and not a wibbly, imprecise compass needle that’s only ever accurate to about half a degree—which translates to thirty nautical miles when you start trying to figure out where you are with it (nautical miles are bigger than normal miles).

But anyway. Hylian royal cartographers clearly have no idea what they’re doing.

And this is when things start making even less sense.

Because why, why on earth do the two eras who are the most insistent on being canonical neighbors have the least compatible maps?! Ocarina of Time and Twilight Princess want me dead in a ditch. The Temple of Time in Twilight Princess goes to great lengths to Be The One From Ocarina of Time. Great! Why the frick is it at the bottom of the map?! The Temple of Time couldn’t be any farther up on Ocarina of Time’s map. We could try just rotating the map because maybe it was that time of the geological epoch and the magnetic poles reversed, but now the desert’s on the right side and it’s always on the left side! If anything, the right side is either mountains or ocean! Definitely not a desert. Not allowed. But what if we used the other version of Twilight Princess’ map—the mirror image flippy one from the Wii version!!! Because this makes sense!!!—and pretend the magnetic pole just happened to invert between these two games and that Hyrule’s cartography division is smoking crack and convinced that orienting all your maps towards magnetic north with no indication that true north even exists is the best way of doing things. Fine. Now Kokiri forest ends up in either Zora’s Domain or Snowpeak and the Hidden Village, which is supposedly the Kakariko from Ocarina of Time, turns out to have once been Zora’s Domain.

And that’s not even the worst offender! I’m already ignoring the frick out of the Four Swords games, but the first two Zelda games?

Like, look, I know I said I was giving a pass for hardware limitations and the irl game chronology but come on—it’s the same guy, it’s the same kingdom, and you didn’t even try to make them match up! Like maybe Zelda 1 can be given a pass because it has that same basic scaffold of mountain up, desert left, forest right, but then Zelda 2’s map is just the biggest pile of mayhem and I wouldn’t be bothered if it wasn’t explicitly the same kingdom just a little while later! Like what?! And there’s no way to reconcile any of this even remotely with that volcanic hotspot location, which has been our one and only constant in this labyrinthine hellscape!

Look, guys, I tried. I tried to come up with a way to make any of this remotely make sense.

This was about how far I’d gotten before realizing I might not be using the right approach, here.

Because the whole point of this silly project is to make celestial navigation jokes! Maybe the Kingdom of Hyrule is on the back of a big massive turtle that crawls all around the world and bumps into other turtles sometimes! It doesn’t actually matter! What matters is how the sky behaves.

So why don’t we just do celestial navigation and see if we can’t figure out what latitudes these absolutely zooted turtles are at.

But this post is long enough and also I haven’t finished collecting all my data from the various 3D zelda games so i’ll see you all in part two! (don’t hold your breath)

edit: part two is out, baby!!

#squido's op #linkeduniverse #linked universe #squido rants #squido rambles #squido's navigational escapades

41 notes · View notes