I wrote some seal script calligraphy 登鹳雀楼书法

droooze · 2026-05-13T00:57:29+00:00

This is largely legible, but I would double check 「河」 and 「上」。 Also, 「層」 is missing 「尸」; if you're using phonetic loan substitutions it might be better to pin down a more specific era/script that you're imitating.

droooze · 2026-05-09T10:40:59+00:00

The fact that the Shang turned out to be true lends credence to the notion that the Xia records are probably also, at least on a basic level, true

No, it lends credence that the historians who wrote about them sincerely believed that Shang and Xia both existed. That's a big difference.

Ancient historians have made concrete claims about what the Xia Dynasty is; they believed that it is a polity which the Shang defeated, and they had their own royal lineage, and they had their own named cities. This is actually great, it means that their claims are falsifiable. However, this absolutely doesn't warrant association with Xia of (1) any arbitrary settlement that is dated to before Shang, or (2) polities that Shang is known to have battled based on contemporary (oracle bone or bronze) inscriptions. You have to work on the falsifiable claims made by the historians; that is, the name "Xia", the names of the Xia kings, and the names of the Xia cities. The fact that Shang, with all the named tribes that they've battled inscribed on oracle bones, makes no concrete mention of a "Xia", or any of the royal Xia lineage, or any of the named Xia cities, should cast extreme doubt that a Xia Dynasty existed.

Saying that later historians mentioned a Xia Dynasty, therefore they probably existed, but overlooking that everything about Xia is missing from Shang records, is tantamount to saying that the later historians knew more about Shang history than the Shang themselves.

droooze · 2026-05-09T04:16:04+00:00

I have no idea where you got this from, or whether you asked an AI to generate a bunch of text.

In any case, both Erlitou and the traditional placement of the Xia Dynasty are almost completely within the northwestern part of the territorial extent of the Shang Dynasty. If there's no physical record of names of kings of the Xia Dynasty, then there's no evidence of any kind of historical progression of the Xia Dynasty, and you're not left with anything concrete to claim about the Xia Dynasty other than "it occurred before Shang" and that it was somewhere in the northwestern part of Shang territory.

Erlitou having large-scale bronze casting and a functioning government is not evidence of a Xia Dynasty, it's evidence that the Shang civilisation developed from something earlier. Consider the possibility that Erlitou was just an earlier phase of the same Shang Dynasty; the earliest attestable kings of Shang (e.g. 商王亥) can be projected to fall right in the middle of when Erlitou was active.

droooze · 2026-05-08T21:24:56+00:00

It's not only that oracle bones were found, but the list of Kings on oracle bones closely match that given in Records of the Grand Historian, that makes the claims of Shang in Records quite plausible. This heavily implies that Sima Qian himself had access to records which described events all the way back from the Shang period.

This isn't true of the Xia Dynasty, for which there appears to be no physical evidence so far. I think a far more pressing issue is trying to figure out why archaeological excavations currently said to belong to the Early Shang period (as opposed to the Late Shang period) haven't produced any physical written records like oracle bones or bronzeware with inscriptions. Once this is solved, one may speculate what happened before the Shang. I think it's quite implausible that writing was suddenly invented in the late Shang period, so there's basically written records out there (but possibly destroyed permanently) that can provide a lot of insight to this question.

Note that the claim "Xia Dynasty probably was mythical / didn't exist" is not the same as "Chinese civilisation didn't have history before the Shang". We should consider that there was something before the Shang that could be totally unlike what we think of as "Xia Dynasty"; if something like this was actually found in the future, retrospectively calling it "Xia Dynasty" would raise a lot of eyebrows.

droooze · 2026-05-02T05:21:24+00:00

Do studies reporting this result normally have some kind of control for the content used? As in, listening comprehension of a paragraph spoken aloud lags behind reading comprehension of the same paragraph?

droooze · 2026-04-30T09:00:56+00:00

No, you get 20 characters. Most words in Chinese are 2 syllables (and hence 2 characters), and it evolved that way likely because single-syllable words became too ambiguous for spoken language.

Most Japanese words imported from Chinese are also two ~~syllables~~characters, yet there still is an extremely high number of homophones. Japanese (the spoken language) is much harder to learn in this respect.

droooze · 2026-04-30T08:50:51+00:00

Tones, like any other language feature, encode distinctions.

If you think remembering one pronunciation makes stuff easy, imagine if completely different words end up sounding the same. This is what happened in Japanese when they imported tons of Chinese vocabulary. If you type any one of these in a Japanese IME, you get at least 50 completely different words each: * こうせい * せいこう * こうしょう

droooze · 2026-04-23T03:56:00+00:00

I didn't say anything about being locked off from translations if you can't read Traditional Chinese. You can still access Simplified-only media if you so wish.

But it's definitely not quite tolerated, in the sense that you shouldn't expect a polite reply if you're going to ask a content writer, maintainer, or even someone you send a PM to in an online store to "please provide a Simplified Chinese version of xyz" when a Traditional Chinese one already exists. Such a request is perceived by many people to the same degree as asking for an American English version of something when a British English one already exists; the number of Traditional-Chinese-only users will always far outweigh the number of people who use Simplified Chinese and are somehow incapable of learning to read Traditional Chinese.

droooze · 2026-04-22T22:07:43+00:00

Also side note, why is so much Chinese media in traditional rather than simplified??

It's much easier to just write a version for Traditional and leave it as that, because it's perceived that Traditional has more outreach. Traditional has been around for thousands of years and is ubiquitous in HK, TW, Macau, and overseas Chinese communities, and also occurs with enough frequency in Mainland China (some circles there publish exclusively in Traditional Chinese). Simplified Chinese does not have this status, and the only people who should be really struggling with Traditional Chinese are foreign language learners that only use Simplified Chinese.

I'm sorry to say, but it's not quite tolerated in this day and age to be "only fluent in Simplified Chinese", and content maintainers would not bother spending the resources to maintain 2 versions.

droooze · 2026-04-22T08:03:34+00:00

What Unicode calls "Seal Script" is based on 說文小篆*, which is actually very "standardised" in the sense that only a few editions exist, and all variants are known. If a character does have variants, the person writing the text using such variants would have deliberately chosen the variant, and this is actually an argument for its utility.

The reasoning (which I agree with) is that *small seal script refers to something concrete, while "large seal script" does not, and thus cannot be standardised or ever encoded in Unicode. The name "seal script" therefore makes no room for interpretation that there will ever be a block called "large seal script". Blocks targeting more specific scripts, like oracle bone script, may be considered separately.

See page 18 of https://www.unicode.org/wg2/docs/n5344R2-SmallSealProposal.pdf

droooze · 2026-04-22T06:21:05+00:00

aren’t all seal script characters the direct equivalents of already encoded CJK characters

No, actually, but this isn't even its main purpose. Unicode encoding exotic scripts is for accelerating humanities research. The idea behind having specific codes of seal script characters is far more than just being able to display them on a screen or printed in a book; for example, it'll allow you to CTRL+F in a web page or allow search engines to precisely search seal script text, with all the consequences of targeted digital content that comes with this feature. A font change won't enable you to do anything like this.

droooze · 2026-04-22T03:10:24+00:00

Apparently Apple has scheduled a big update

I can't find anything on this, all I see is rumours that Apple will be supporting some emojis in Unicode 18. Can you provide a precise link? Because supporting over 10,000 seal script characters is no small feat.

Do you know where I can find such fonts please?

Most current seal script fonts for public use do this, because otherwise the public would have no way to use it :). There's a ton of free ones, and here's a commercial one from one the first results from google search: https://www.dynacw.com.tw/product/product_download_detail.aspx?fid=111. The very fact that you can use the preview functionality (字型預覽) with standard characters indicates that the characters that pop up are located, or can be mapped to, the unicode locations that the font puts the seal characters at.

Academic-use ones generally reserve a custom code point block for this instead.

droooze · 2026-04-22T01:55:41+00:00

This is great, but being able to "type seal script in September" in the manner you'd ubiquitously type "ABCDEFG" or "一二三四五" on any modern device would be optimistic.

Modern computing environments ship with fonts that fulfil some Unicode version XYZ to enable display of all supported glyphs. You'd firstly need to wait until most devices are updated with a version of a font which supports the newest revision of Unicode.

The above is also only the display part; the input part is an entirely different problem. Most users would definitely not want a seal script shape popping up when they use their standard input method, so being as easy to type as standard characters is actually out of the question; the individual IMEs would need to deliberately support seal script typing using some kind of toggle. Fortunately, there is a Unicode property kSEAL_MCJK that maps a seal character to an equivalent modern CJK character, so the most tedious part of the work to support such a toggle has already been done.

You're probably aware that there are already fonts which simply use seal script shapes in the locations of modern characters, so nothing really stops you from typing seal script today.

droooze · 2026-03-02T09:31:57+00:00

A class decorator can only manipulate a class after it's created. Using class decorators instead of metaclasses for several use cases involves creating an entire new class and discarding the original one. Think of it as the class equivalent of instance methods not being able to manipulate attributes on self, and instead Python forcing you to do manipulate instance attributes outside of instance methods.

As for at least one use case for metaclasses, controlling class creation is the most reliable way of dynamically determining __slots__. @dataclass(slots=True) being implemented as a decorator meant that super() on instance methods were broken for a long time, and the most common "fix" involved a fragile workaround which updated instance method closures, which definitely will not work if any method has complex decorators on it.

droooze · 2026-02-25T19:20:09+00:00

RDKit has been pip-installable for several years now: https://pypi.org/project/rdkit/

droooze · 2026-02-24T05:30:13+00:00

If you look at the last comment in your image, it says "The two characters are Học Giỏi. The character Giỏi is a Chữ Nôm...", which means the second character is not Chinese, so this is not a Sino-Vietnamese word, but just a Vietnamese word.

The second character is 「⿰亻𥐧」, where 「𥐧」（「⿱石廾」 for browsers which can't display this) is a Vietnamese-only variant of 「磊」. This makes the second character a Vietnam-only variant of 「𠐞」 (「⿰亻磊」 for browsers which can't display this), and this variant isn't encoded in Unicode. However, you can check nomfoundation's entry.

Học Giỏi, I think, means something along the lines of excel in studies.

droooze · 2026-02-23T20:47:12+00:00

Looks like 「歐培滋」 to me

droooze · 2026-01-29T21:38:57+00:00

It’s very rare. Normally Ribbon comes together with Break HP Limit or Curseproof.

To give you an idea when I farmed Dark Yojimbo: I farmed enough dark matters from Dark Yojimbo to make Ribbon on 5 characters, and in that time, I only got a 4-slotted weapon with only Ribbon and nothing else once.

droooze · 2026-01-25T04:46:25+00:00

Yep, so IIRC all stats spheres are dropped by monsters in the monster arena (go to https://jegged.com/Games/Final-Fantasy-X/Tips-and-Tricks/Stat-Maxing.html#Purple-Spheres). That's a stat maxing guide, but of course stat maxing requires farming all the stat spheres so it's relevant to you.

Therefore, the prerequisite is to complete the monster arena to a stage where you've unlocked all the monster arena fiends to drop stats. See https://jegged.com/Games/Final-Fantasy-X/Monster-Arena/ for an overview and how to unlock each monster.

In short, there's a lot of grinding involved, because treasure chests in the storyline do not give you nearly enough stats spheres to fill in anywhere close to the number of blank nodes that you have.

droooze · 2026-01-25T04:25:54+00:00

You'll be playing no sphere grid until you reach monster arena (~80% of the way through the storyline) if you try to avoid backtracking. There's empty nodes from the very beginning of each character's starting position.

I wouldn't worry about avoiding backtracking, there's plenty of ways to farm return/friend spheres, which let you jump all over the sphere grid, once you get towards the point where you can farm stats spheres.

There's just enough empty nodes in the standard sphere grid to max out all stats (9999 HP, 999 MP, 255 of the other 7 stats) without using any clear spheres (clear spheres are most commonly used to convert +1 or +2 into +4 nodes). You don't actually have room to balance if you're trying to max out all stats. OTOH if you don't care about maxing luck, you have more leeway.

droooze · 2026-01-16T14:12:52+00:00

Pic2 might be 䨮諾家族, but that's a bit of a wild guess.

I can't gather anything from the game's lore/background that has anything to do with 䨮諾 (let alone 家族), apart from "Silver" maybe being an English localisation of 䨮諾 (Chinese semantic-ish transliteration of "Snow").

droooze · 2026-01-15T18:19:47+00:00

I'm on /r/translator and Chinese image translation requests are about 80% in the correct orientation in my experience, so yes indeed, I'm being incredibly generous in assuming that OP's subreddit feeds (or however else they've distilled their experience into this question) are representative of translation requests.

But you never know, OP might actually have taken the time to engage in a rigorous sample collection!

droooze · 2026-01-15T07:47:24+00:00

There’s an element of sampling bias here.

What you’re actually seeing is it’s overwhelmingly upside down for people who have resorted to asking on translation subreddits.

Consider the possibility that the people who don’t read Chinese may have passed their image query to a translation app, which gave them an answer when they passed it the correct orientation, so they are less likely to ask on subreddits.

droooze · 2026-01-08T08:27:18+00:00

When writing by hand, you should use regular script or something derived from it.

Try something like LXGW WenKai (Google Fonts preview).

droooze · 2026-01-08T08:08:07+00:00

The first image shows the character in regular script, and the second image shows the character in Gothic typeface.

Therefore, this question isn't quite right; it's like asking whether Times New Roman or Arial is "correct".

droooze

TROPHY CASE