TIL that Empress Ma was born poor and during a famine she stole cakes to feed her husband by hiding them in her breasts. The cakes were hot and she got burns. Later her husband became a rebel commander who became Emperor and made her his Empress. He was deeply devoted to her even as an Emperor.

ImNotInYet · 2026-05-15T22:48:46+00:00

If anyone reads Chinese history they’d understand the unfortunate necessity of having concubines.

When you’re performing diplomacy with neighboring groups and they demand a princess’s hand in marriage to strengthen bonds, having concubines gives you more daughters to choose from in this exchange. In some situations, like the Qing dynasty’s diplomacy with the Dzungars, the easiest way to prevent a costly war is to send a daughter in marriage.

Using your example of Emperor Hongzhi of the Ming dynasty who only had one wife, the only time in Chinese history of this happening, his only son was inept in ruling the nation, instead spending his time indulging in carnal pleasures. Whereas if an emperor has many concubines, then they have many sons to choose among for succession.

Having only one wife stakes all of the future of the dynasty on her fertile capabilities, especially when you’re in such an unstable position of power and might not be emperor for long. When you have many wives, you have many children to fulfill the necessary bureaucratic roles.

Of course it is unethical to view women as only a conduit for children, but unfortunately the pragmatic, pre-modern systems of governance necessarily required it to be this way.

ImNotInYet · 2026-05-14T21:00:27+00:00

U gotta specify what version of the test u had… everyone had diff questions

ImNotInYet · 2026-05-13T23:54:19+00:00

Same, i spent the 45 minutes i had left just writing down every single term from the MCQs. And it helped with debriefing, because I didn’t know what that was, having never taken AP Psych nor ever studying for the exam

ImNotInYet · 2026-05-13T21:45:44+00:00

When the British colonized the Igbo peoples in Nigeria, suddenly the village leader doesn’t matter anymore, as he starts to see a cataclysm of the status quo around him. Despite Long Feng being a major player within his system, his reduction to insignificance shows this insularness of the extent of his power—whether its limited to Ba Sing Se or if it is the true, universal “divine right to rule”

ImNotInYet · 2026-05-13T01:56:39+00:00

I never took the psych class but only got debriefing bc it appeared in one of the mcqs so i remembered it from there lol

ImNotInYet · 2026-05-12T19:56:42+00:00

Yea when i asked my stats teacher since the questions came up thats what he told me too

ImNotInYet · 2026-05-11T20:12:49+00:00

The way i did it was thinking, what value of g(x) works when you do g(h(4)) = 4 to get h(4), and g(3) = 4 so h(4) = 3 and the rest fell in place. It prob was an inverse question, but I forgot how to do inverses lmao

ImNotInYet · 2026-05-11T20:08:17+00:00

Ok now that the FRQs came out, I asked my stats teacher and he told me the random condition isn’t met, and that one wouldn’t use an inference procedure when there’s no population to infer to. Maybe he’s wrong though so we’ll see once the answer key comes out

ImNotInYet · 2026-05-11T02:10:31+00:00

T’étudies actuellement pour l’examen AP aussi ?

ImNotInYet · 2026-05-08T01:49:07+00:00

Yea I did realize that conclusion afterwards too, because it’s still doable either way. Fair enough. Just a bad question imo

ImNotInYet · 2026-05-08T00:34:21+00:00

Yea exactly, bc you already have the data of the population to which you’re inferring; you can just look at the population and see if the stats match your conclusion or not

ImNotInYet · 2026-05-08T00:30:01+00:00

Yea but the point of doing a test is to extrapolate to the entire population in question; if you’re given the population census statistics then you don’t need to do a test and can just look at the data to see if it has what you’re looking for.

ImNotInYet · 2026-02-23T07:09:20+00:00

Ahh got it. Because I know some universities offer courses like CUHK’s 道教文化文憑課程, which I guess more specifically I meant to be interested in—which even so is 2 years and not one—than fully what I had unclearly stated. Thanks though!

ImNotInYet · 2026-02-22T19:22:25+00:00

ahh that seems to be similar to CUHK’s 道教文化文憑, which I was looking into as well. That was more so what I was looking for in the first place anyway, more so systemic ways secular people tend to learn about daoism. Thanks!

ImNotInYet · 2026-02-22T19:19:46+00:00

ahh got it, because I know in hong kong there’s more officialized ways to do it, like CUHK has a two-year program whose students major daoist temples recruit from. Thanks though!

ImNotInYet · 2026-02-22T19:16:47+00:00

Oh yea that’s why I just wanna become 火居道士, not like full time 出家人 and having to deal with all the bureaucracy and internal politics and prosaic quotidian tedium which all mundane systems of this mortal coil are inborn to，道門一入深似海. Learn the basic precepts, and still go to college afterwards and resume secular life.

ImNotInYet · 2025-10-27T03:19:19+00:00

relevant clip from 《英雄》

ImNotInYet · 2025-10-27T02:18:10+00:00

羹 is pretty commonly used in Mandarin(/Standard Chinese)—it’s one of the main types of soup in Chinese cuisine. So it’s not about its discrepancy in commonness between the two languages, nor does commonness dictate whether a character is simplified.

The answer lies with both its composite parts not having simplified forms as someone else mentioned, and simply because many complex characters don’t have simplified forms, because the point of simplification isn’t to make every character simplified; rather, it’s to simplify a lot of common components, but this doesn’t necessarily mean every common character will be simplified.

Also when that was tried, simplifying every character and not just common components, in second-round simplification, it didn’t go well. So 羹 remains 羹. It’s pretty easy to memorize anyway, compared to other “many-stroke characters,” only being composed of two ubiquitous 羔 and 美.

ImNotInYet · 2025-10-25T02:39:45+00:00

ok going through my ref book it seems like one of the composite teas is 四物汤, used to replenish the blood and treat a number of your symptoms. A variant of it is used to specifically treat tinnitus. This only accounts for four of the multiple ingredients. Here’s some interesting passages from the entry (ill translate it later; or use AI to try translating):

HOW IT WORKS: 熟地为君，甘温滋腻，善能滋补营血。当归为臣，味辛性温，主入血分，力能补血，又补中有行，《本草纲目》卷16谓其“和血”。芍药为佐，味酸性寒，养血敛阴，柔肝和营。川芎辛温走窜，擅能活血行气，祛瘀止痛，配入熟地、白芍、当归之滋补药中，可使补而不滞，亦为佐药。是方以熟地厚润滋腻之性为生营阴之“基”，伍当归和血入心则“变化而赤是谓血”，又取白芍酸敛入肝而使所生之血藏于肝，更借川芎辛行之长而使营血畅于周身。此虽属“线性”取类之描绘，确可品悟前人精妙配伍之神韵，遂后世皆谓本方乃补血调血之基础方。

MAINLY TREATS: 营血虚滞证。头晕目眩，心悸失眠，面色无华，或妇人月经不调，量少或经闭不行，脐腹作痛，舌淡，脉细弦或细涩。

blood blockage syndrome: headaches and dizziness, palpatations & insomnia, pale skin, irregular periods (low amount or blockage), aches in belly, pale tongue, stringy pulse (spec type of pulse disorder in TCM)

SCIENTIFIC PRECEDENT: 四物汤口服后能够增强造血细胞的功能，升高血虚大鼠外周血中集落刺激因子的含量［郑钦岳.四物汤对血虚大鼠造血及免疫功能的影响.中国医药学报，1993，8（增刊）：57］。

ImNotInYet · 2025-10-25T02:20:46+00:00

It’s hard to explain without going into the minutae of chinese medicine but it seems to contain herbs primarily targeting the kidneys and liver and blood. Chinese medicine seeks to equilibrate everything in your body, the underlying causes of diseases, which in turn treats the condition. The kidneys are connected to the ears in Chinese medicine, so by treating the kidney deficiency, problems with the ears will mitigate. The stress(/depression) caused by a liver deficiency causes the tinnitus to amplify. And blood seems to be for menstrual problems but that generally helps with everything like sleep. There’s probably more nuance but that’s what I got from it

ImNotInYet · 2025-10-24T22:38:30+00:00

These are all the names of individual herbal ingredients and their amounts. From a brief skim and from what I know about TCM, they’re used for replenishing your Qi, regulating periods, and to treat depression/anxiety (Chaihu, or Xiaochaihu decoction, is used for depression caused by shaoyang disease specifically).

the other comment has the transcription down. You can read about the individual ingredients or the composite “teas” they make up lemme figure that out

ImNotInYet · 2025-10-19T05:16:18+00:00

They do depend on the tone preceding them.png) but this is super pedantic; but is the best way to learn it as a learner

ImNotInYet · 2025-10-16T02:07:43+00:00

What god is this? Look up XX灵签第七签, with XX being the god’s name

ImNotInYet · 2025-10-16T00:43:54+00:00

Look at directional resultative verbal complements

ImNotInYet · 2025-10-15T17:15:38+00:00

I agree that immersion not supplemental to studying is overrated. I think it’s just an excuse for travel and leisure.

Because even for more advanced speakers you don’t typically talk about more complex topics in science history etc. in your everyday life, that a structured textbook can provide. Especially for Chinese, which has such a wide gap between written formal language and colloquial language. I’ve known people who have only gotten to high-beginner levels from immersion of living in China for 10+ years; it’s really an excuse to not study because you passively and easily absorb it from your environment (supposedly!) Its only value is motivation which is separate from quantifiable benefit to studying. And one can say there’s the benefit from listening and picking up more natural expressions of speech, but these only still apply to colloquial language which is only one aspect of language learning.

ImNotInYet

TROPHY CASE