Aphilosopherchair - Dinner Made In Adrenaline Imbroglios
More Posts from Aphilosopherchair and Others
Still mind-blown by this concept. It's arguably even more imaginative than Liu Cixin's scifi works, since people expect so much from books and screen creations but so little from disabled individuals, who have career dreams and need financial protection.
Here you can see some of Puuung’s lovely illustrations. “Love” is something that everybody can relate to. And “Love” comes in ways that we can easily overlook in our daily lives. So, She tries to find the meaning of love in our daily lives and make it into artworks. These are a part of her illustrations. Please visit her portfolio on Grafolio. We hope you enjoy more Puuung’s works. http://www.grafolio.com/puuung1
Bard's Dark Forest Cuisine
Soon to be dramatized. Spoiler alert.
Black Forest cake. This is a rich and decadent chocolate cake that is filled with cherries and whipped cream. The dark color of the cake is a symbol of the dark forest, while the cherries represent the stars.
Shrimp cocktail. This is a classic appetizer that is made with shrimp that are cooked in a cocktail sauce. The shrimp represent the civilizations that are hiding in the dark forest, while the cocktail sauce represents the fear and paranoia that exists between them.
Oysters Rockefeller. These are oysters that are topped with a creamy sauce that is made with spinach, bacon, and Parmesan cheese. The oysters represent the civilizations that are trying to survive in the dark forest, while the sauce represents the hope and determination that they have for the future.
Black bean soup. This is a hearty and flavorful soup that is made with black beans, tomatoes, onions, and garlic. The black color of the soup is a symbol of the dark forest, while the beans represent the civilizations that are trying to survive in it.
Take the AI definitions with a pinch of Himalayan black salt, however. Numerous variants of a dish often exist. With that in mind, bon appétit.
A reminder to fellow writers:
Don't feel too guilty about loving a heroine you painstakingly created just because she's not a paragon of virtue. That's especially if you've thrown curses into the blazing Sun for her, and cried by her side at the edge of a dusk-lit world.
Ilera's Mink Membrane Network
None upon a time, a clerk named Sunshine was so utterly repulsed by his soul-sucking job, which was barely funding his occasional time travel jaunts, he tried many methods to jazz it up—task gamification, plugging in to groovy music, sprinkling more decorations over his dedicated workspace (before the grand comeback of hot desking). Finally, he wondered if it would help, counterintuitively, to reduce the jarring contrast between his work hours and non-work hours and pioneered the hobby of adminpunk—remaking bureaucratic mouthpieces into pop songs, common email refrains into romantic dance shorts and his best public deliverables into glowwave art pieces. Sunshine became so engrossed with adminpunk he bemoaned he did not have more publicly disclosable material to work with. And so, he started to sieve through history for pinnacles of human success he could reverse-engineer into meteoritins, hyperspread bulletins that marked moments of great dreams or great devastation or both. That was where he became fascinated with the intriguing figure Ilera's legacy. The following was a meteoritin Sunshine typed up:
"The Inter-Time Ethics Agency (hereafter 'the Agency') has imposed temporal ethics courses and non-disclosure agreements in relation to technology transfer on time travelers and tight quotas on time travel journeys to minimize butterfly effects capable of reversing births across generations. These reversals are now regarded as a form of death to otherwise existing individuals. While it is acknowledged that much controversy surrounds the preventive measures, which carry their own downsides such as temporal inequality and epistemic bystanderism, the Agency has come to the consensus that the wipe-offs of existing lives on the timeline is the greatest of all harms.
Nevertheless, heeding the calls of campaigners behind the All-Time Freedom of Movement, the Agency has conducted public consultations to seek a greater balance between birth reversal prevention and mobility rights. One of the outcomes of the consultations is the construction of the Mink Membrane Network, a brainchild of Her Excellency Ilera from the Extratemporal Serenetics Habitat. The commencement of network operation as a mode of time travel is scheduled to take place concomitantly with the abolishment of time travel mechanisms involving moa/antimoa manipulation.
Aspiring time travelers wishing to proceed with their journeys despite exhaustion of quotas for the year shall utilize the network and, in so doing, agree to having their age group and gender swapped to whatever are more disadvantageous at their geotemporal destinations. If their own age group and gender are the relatively disadvantaged demographics at those destinations, the travelers shall have their skin converted to a wood-like appearance on arrival. These changes are excellent learning opportunities and will be undone on return.
Since mental alterations are seen as unacceptably invasive, in the absence of overwhelming neurological need and even with free consent, at the time of this decision, nothing in the network is to modify any time traveler's gender identity (including any pre-existing transgenderness or agenderedness) or religion. Because gender psychologies remain the same such that declared or apparent gender identity can be deceiving, unlike the case of natural transgenderness, physically gender-swapped time travelers must adhere to etiquette codes explained by local culture coaches stationed at their arrival points and enforced by time patrols.
To honor Her Excellency Ilera's triumphs against the many adversities that marked her life as a non-hearing, self-taught slave who escaped from her time to pioneer the field of tempochemical science and engineering as well as the above-mentioned habitat for time refugees, members of organizations which percentages of employees from demographic groups marginalized in their times match or exceed the percentages of these groups among their respective general populations shall enjoy priority in the processing of applications for time travel."
100% Human-written. A lengthy epilogue for Confession 91-02
The following poems appeared in the episode broadcast on Tuesday:
1. The 21-st century time-traveling heroine, Hae Su, is mesmerized by a Goryeo prince’s beautiful calligraphy. What the family-loving and genteel man writes is a piece of prose titled “Home Again” by Six Dynasties Chinese poet Tao Yuanming, which describes the poet giving up his governmental post for a peaceful, simple life at his countryside home. (Original text | Translation)
2. As a confession, the prince gifts her “Bamboo Stalk Song,” a poem by Tang author Liu Yuxi that uses inconstant weather as an analogy for ambiguous love. (Original text | Translation – be sure to read the footnote)
3. Since modern-day Koreans are generally not as well-versed in classical Chinese, Su has to depend on his brother and wife (also her cousin) for the interpretation. This, of course, leads to some awkwardness and fury, which Su fails to notice. Then, ignoring the romantic undertones of the poem, she hilariously attempts to copy Goryeo official Kim Ji-dae’s poem on majestic and serene scenery, “Yugasa Temple,” as her response to the prince. Since no translation is available online, The Chair is supplying its own below:
瑜伽寺 유가사 (note that the Korean alphabet has not been invented then)
寺在煙霞無事中 (사재연하무사중)
亂山滴翠秋光濃 (난산적취추광농)
A mist surrounds the tranquil temple in the evening light
A jumble of green mountains and the marvelous sights of autumn beckon
雲間絶磴六七里 (운간절등육칠리)
天末遙岑千萬重 (천말요잠천만중)
Steep stone steps rise for six to seven miles into the clouds
Numerous layers of hills lie at the faraway horizon
茶罷松簷掛微月 (다파송첨괘미월)
講闌風榻搖殘鍾 (강란풍탑요잔종)
After sipping tea, one sees a new crescent hanging at the pine canopy
After a lecture, one hears lingering bell notes from the sleep chambers
溪流應笑玉腰客 (계류응소옥요객)
欲洗未洗紅塵踨 (욕세미세홍진종)
The streams must be laughing at the government official,
Who tries to but cannot wash away his worldly marks
(References: Naver, Apple Daily)
Su eventually settles on this reply: \^0^/
According to Apple Daily, the netizen who identified this poem noted that the current name for a temple which used to be called Yugasa is Donghwasa / 桐華寺. 桐華 is the name of the Chinese novelist who penned the book the show is based on. Readers may like to know that there is another Yugasa Temple, which retains its name to this date and has been associated with the poem. All the same, we are free to regard the coincidence as a cross-cultural tribute.
Similar plots can be found in Scarlet Heart, the 2011 Chinese drama adaptation of the novel. Most poignantly, the quick-witted, Chinese time-traveling heroine there struggles to pronounce the exquisite vocabulary used in letter writing in Qing China, finding herself as good as illiterate despite her education and white-collar background. In both cases, too, it may be one thing to read about polygamy and marriage between closely related individuals as a side note in history books, but another to see it simulated three-dimensionally, with actors viewers emotionally identify with. Time slip shows, clearly, provide excellent opportunities for examining how robust people’s connection to their ancestral past can or should be. On one side, there are the issues of lost heritage and pardoning historical figures for being products of their times. On the other, we have arguments for cultural pride in using language entirely of your own (for Koreans), heightened literacy rates brought about by simplified languages, and support for modern ethical sensibilities.
For more Sino-Korean and Chinese poetry, you are welcome to explore this site category or search for Kuiwon’s very informative WordPress blog, which The Chair has long wanted to introduce here. Kuiwon has also written at length about his thoughts on the issue of Chinese character usage in South Korea. His view, however, neither reflects nor contradicts this site’s.
One mistake in the Korean adaptation warrants notice. As the netizen reported, the story takes place in the AD 900s, but Kim Ji-dae lived from 1190 to 1266, so the writing Su copied from could not have been lying around. At least it is a romantic notion that a book traveled back in time with you—theoretically more romantic, perhaps, than being wooed by the husband of your sick cousin.
Confession 91-02
This is a tale of three time-defying knights, but we shall start with humdrum glory.
16 years felt like half an eternity within the high walls of a mansion with seemingly as many rooms as there were visible stars in the night sky. Is there a better half elsewhere? Ilera often pondered. Born to parents who were slaves themselves in this aristocratic household, she spent her days hauling up trash, scrubbing off grime and wringing wet rags while other slave girls giggled among themselves when they could, sharing gossip about its master, who was always hanging out with a Somaku game buddy who practically lived in a house of ill repute. Hear no evil. That was the natural gift of her complete hearing loss. Why not finish the work quickly so that all of us could have time to teach ourselves to read and live second lives in the worlds of books, where we may travel anywhere we want?
Determined to dissuade her husband from spending time with his friend anyway, her mistress was busy mastering the board game herself. Fascinated by the strategy plays, Ilera would watch the piece patterns shift and shape between the couple, bringing life into the once blank numbness of her servitude. Back in the servants' quarters, she would picture the board on the tattered walls and test out move sequences while lying on her pallet.
One fateful night, the master teasingly left a difficult game situation for the lady to solve. As the frustrated lady went for a bathroom break, Ilera toyed with the pieces and found the correct move. Just then, the lady returned and saw Ilera's solution. Enraged, she accused Ilera of trying to seduce the master with her smart aleckiness, gave her a hard slap and tortured her with a burning iron. Ilera felt like she was in a world of fiery torment, her body writhing and wracking in anguish and her mind reeling, trying to escape the torture she was being put through.
As Ilera cried out in pain, two identical knights whose armor glowed with a bluish energy suddenly appeared in the room to save her. Their footsteps were muffled by the pads that lined their boots, and their swords were made of a glossy black material, their sharp edges glistening in the dim light. The knights moved with grace and precision, their movements carefully calculated as they stepped forward to whisk away Ilera. The shocked aristocrat lady could only nod in fear as they admonished her on the girl's rights. Ilera thanked the knights and gestured for their names and addresses so that she could repay them someday.
"Hold up. There's something you should know," one of the knights suddenly spoke up. "We may look like two people, but in fact, we are actually just a single man, a professional bodyguard from the temporal cluster 91-02. We have traveled back in time using a mechanism that caused us to emerge as multiple individuals in order to ensure moa-antimoa balance across spacetime according to the understanding of physics in our time."
"You mean to say that you're actually just one person?" Ilera wondered to herself, completely bewildered as she read his lips. But as they spoke on, she could tell that they were telling the truth.
Her mind blown by this incredible feat, Ilera spent years studying and eventually figured out how to travel to the time zone referred to as temporal cluster 91-02. However, upon her arrival, she realized that a person traveling forward in time would turn up at their destination invisible. Not used to speaking, she could not verbalize her existence either, for fear of startling the bodyguard. Being touched by an invisible entity or seeing writing or the like appear from nowhere would also make meeting again a one-time acquaintance he did not plan to see anymore eerie.
So Ilera merely watched in silence as the bodyguard went about his everyday life, shielding him from danger without him knowing. Sometimes, it involved diverting human and cyborg enemies with noise in a different direction. Sometimes, it involved altering the trajectory of an optoelectronic dart. Sometimes, she blocked off blows with her thin body, taking the hit for him. At night, she traded her imaginary game board for an imaginary map of hazard zones in his next work day's mission, and her shabby pallet for cold pavements.
On one mission, attack from assassins was so intense Ilera frenetically but astutely pulled off a spectacular series of stunts she picked up in the cluster. Just when she defeated the last assassin, a container of glistening rejuvenation capsules overhead toppled over, the translucent pills of liquid blinking with icy golden hues on contact with her body. Touched by the shimmering silhouette of her fighting pose, the bodyguard was finally certain someone invisible had been protecting him. He expressed his thanks out loud and invited Ilera to dinner.
As Ilera sat down at the dinner table, she was surrounded by a sea of colors and shapes, each formed by light bouncing around in seemingly endless layers of reflections and refractions. She reached out to touch the shining crystals forming the table, which rippled outwards as ripples in a pond, bending the light and creating a brilliant display of optical phenomena. The bodyguard gently smiled. As she explored this new world of physics and light, she couldn't help but find herself utterly transfixed. Bokeh spots then danced around, sharpened into focus and arranged themselves into words: I have traversed grand and unforgettable ancient millennia / But now I only want a future with you / No matter your age or gender.
Blushing in her surprise, Ilera never considered this before but at least had the assurance to type out her story on an airbound screen for him now. However, when the bodyguard learned Ilera's true identity, he choked in disbelief.
"Is this what it is? I am a highly trained professional, yet I … (laughs) I rely on the assistance of a deaf peasant girl from an ignorant, oh okay, bygone era to protect myself and my job? And I cultivated feelings for a mockery of me!" He pointed at her with a fat finger on impulse.
Ilera was shaken as his mouth trembled in rage. Repaying a kind deed was all that was previously on her mind. Never had she been in love with him. In the end, her fellow exponents, no matter the field of practice, place or time, saw her only as a rival or potential object of desire. We forever voyage on Atlantic trade ships propelled by our threatened primitive interests and our lurking thirst for power, every one of us bound by each other's history, ravaged by rich seas of little. Another light shone. With determined steps, the former slave girl disappeared into the mists of time. The cosmos was now her board, and she would be its game architect.
Credits
Plot + scifi terminology: Human
Prose: Human + 3 AI services
Atlantic trade note: Human's musing on Liu Cixin's afterword in the English edition of The Three-Body Problem
Escape From Everything Everywhere One by One —a film-inspired escape game
A series of escape rooms based on Everything Everywhere All At Once:
(Warning: Spoilerverse ahead!)
The first escape room: The first escape room is set in a laundromat, just like in the movie. The walls are covered in graffiti, and there are clothes and other laundry strewn about the room.
The keys: Players must find items that will allow them to travel to different universes. For example, they might need to find a pair of shiny buttons, a woman's and a man's, to travel to the universe where Evelyn is a movie star reuniting with her old love, or they might need to find a rock with googly eyes among many rocks to travel to the abiotic universe.
The puzzles: The puzzles in the escape room are all based on different universes that Evelyn Wang verse-jumps to in the movie. They block clues to the locations of the keys. For example, one puzzle might involve using the knowledge of a bagel chef to piece together the perfect bagel model, which acts as a knob of an oven cabinet where a key or clue to a key location can be found. Another puzzle would be translating Cantonese words on a signboard, by chaining up a jumble of bilingual dictionaries, only one of which contains English and none of which translates Cantonese to English, in the universe where Evelyn is a sign spinner.
The clues: Like in all escape game recommendations, some of the clues are obvious, while others are more obscure. For example, one clue might be a piece of paper with horrifying tax figures that would wake up even the deadest work zombie, while another clue might be a song lyric that only makes sense if you've seen the movie.
The physical challenges: Some escape rooms entail physical challenges. For example, in the universe where Evelyn is a cook contending with a rival who has a raccoon master, players can "knock out" an army of agile staff members dressed in raccoon costumes by hitting their fake tummies with paintballs. In the universe where Evelyn is an opera star, players are to wear Chinese opera costumes and gather in front of a camera within a time limit. In the hot dog universe—you've guessed it—players must work through everything using hot dog fingers. That, and playing piano keys correctly with their toes. The hot dog fingers could be made slippery, so that it's difficult to control them.
The ending: If players are able to solve all of the puzzles and overcome all of the challenges, they will be able to exit the multiverse through a giant everything bagel. Or maybe, they will beg the game host to let them stay for an eternity.
Obvious choices for background music: Laundry sounds, kung fu themes, Chinese opera, Le Festin, and the soundtracks of the film itself, In The Mood For Love, The Matrix, The Mask and maybe 2001: A Space Odyssey.
The escape room would be a great way to test film lovers' creativity and problem-solving skills while exploring the different universes that Evelyn Wang verse-jumps to in the movie.
Kindly remember to send this human editor and human generative filler the bagel donations.
Outreach: APC Suicide Prevention Campaign
Caution: Indirect spoilers ahead.
If a writer's work can save a life, should we be finicky about the medium the finished product officially appears in? Quite a number of us must be wishing we could turn back time and dissuade someone from taking his or her own life, however devastating circumstances might have been. Planned for slightly more than half a decade since the year a colleague committed suicide, screenwriter Kim Eun-sook's hit drama Goblin (available on Dramafever) tells the tale of a Korean mythical being known as dokkaebi, often loosely translated as "goblin," who longs to end his 939 years of immortal existence only to change his mind when he develops feelings for the human bride sent by God to fulfill this wish. Viewership soared to record-breaking numbers for Korean cable television history as the couple and their offbeat friends confronted the implications of life, death, suffering and co-existence with the miraculous, alongside heartbreaking dilemmas of living for their love versus dying for others. Adding more pathos to the series is the common tragic sin the formidable-looking army of amnesiac grim reaper bureaucrats in their universe are revealed to be undergoing rehabilitation for.
Kim Eun-sook's love for language is palpable not only in her lyrical sentences, including those used in scene descriptions found only on the script, and humorous wordplay, but also in her well-thought-out choices of poetry for mood creation purposes. Selected from the anthology Maybe The Stars Will Take Away Your Sorrow, Kim In-yook's entrancing lines in "The Physics of Love" mark the goblin's awakening to love and perhaps the allure of life, while Hortense Vlou's short but unforgettable French poem "Desert" brings out the bleakness of isolated existence. On February 10, 2017, sponsoring publisher Wisdom House shared that other books featured in this 2016-7 production include:
One Word From God - Japanese author Hiroshi Ogiwara's salaryman novel touching on work-related suicides
The Lives of Real Men - collection of meditative letters from Joseon scholars
Let's Meet! There's No More Time for Love - collection of healing essays by Korean multidisciplinary arts practitioner Shin Hyun-rim
This Unfinished Life [Chinese title] / Why I Live Today [Korean title] - deceased Chinese professor Yu Juan's answer to The Last Lecture
The Time of One Spoon - Korean writer Ku Byung-mo's fantasy novel in which a key character lives on bravely despite setbacks
There is no such thing as a free lunch, but it sure is hard to lament too much during the times the television industry pays for its costly diet of (God/goblin/reaper/ghost-inflicted) vehicle wreckage by offering nutrition for the soul.
Here is the announcement you have been scrolling down for: Suicide is not a risk emerging only on World Suicide Prevention Day. All year round, we need reminders about the sacredness of life and about the importance of being patient for things to work out, be this through self-growth, perspective changes, or arrival of unanticipated help. So, RECOMMEND a book, play or screen production that would curb suicidal ideation and give all of us a strong reason to live on. The work need not be Asian or fiction, but should preferably contain no evangelical content.
If you have a social media account, post a description of the work and attach the tag "APC Friends Against Suicide" (for Twitter users, that would have to be #APCFriendsAgainstSuicide) so that we can see each other's recommendation. To save time, you can also choose to submit a simple reply with the title of the work using the messaging functions on Tumblr or tweet the name to APC. Selected responses will be shared on Dinner Talk With The A-Philosopher's Chair, if time permits.
Help a reader choose endurance over death and help APC drum up much-needed support for its existing articles on inter/intra-group biases and cognitive illusions. Let everybody keep an open mind to the possibilities of life!
An energy economy intubated, intercepted and interrogated by its multiverse escape game, TikTok-addicted black holes, go-getting cerebral vampires and healing rice ball spirits. Originally an extension of The Asian Drama Philosopher (A-Philosopher)’s Chair, a site examining literature, art and ideas featured in East Asian series.
121 posts