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OP: Turns out China already had memes back then. These are basically memes from Chinese people several hundred years ago.
Cnetizens: Our ancestors were much more unhinged than us. They used seals the way we use reaction memes.
(OP stumbled upon a seal catalogue from the late‑Ming and early‑Qing dynasties. It was collected by Zhou Lianggong周亮工(1612‑1672), a poet and a seal enthusiast who also loved carving seals himself. He was deeply passionate about collecting seals and compiled an album of seal impressions called 赖古堂印谱Lai‑Gu‑Tang Seal Album, gathering seals carved by himself and other artists. Most of the seals shown below come from this book. Seals are impressed on both sides of every page, with transcribed texts attached. The seals within the volume are arranged from largest to smallest according to their shape. Many of the carved inscriptions are very down‑to‑earth, filled with witty little rants.)
OP: Let’s see just how delightfully laid‑back everyone’s leisure seals are. (cr衡庐篆刻)
Chinese netizens shared their leisure seals(闲章xianzhang). Leisure seals are carvings made purely for personal interest, not the official stamps used for documents. Many people in China enjoy collecting and carving them. One category is book‑ownership seals(藏书章cangzhuzhang, literally seals hiding in books), which people stamp in books while reading. They function much like reading notes, pre‑reading thoughts, or simply mark that one has finished the book.
These are other seals preserved in Lai‑Gu‑Tang Seal Album from hundreds of years ago, leaning toward a more literary aesthetic.
Many museums nowadays also offer souvenir stamps for visitors to leave mementos, and most of them are free of charge. If the stamp runs out of ink, simply ask a staff member to refill it. They can usually get it done very quickly. When you visit calligraphy‑famous scenic spots such as the Forest of Stone Steles(碑林belin), you can get a small portable jade seal carved with your own name as a keepsake.
ALTThe 2026 Snail Facts Advent Calendars are OUT!
We've got 24 days of scratchable snail fact goodness, designed by Philly artist Kelly Nichols! Just scratch off the snail shells to reveal cool facts about the snails of the world.
Get one at SquidFacts.net
In addition to being cute as hell and educational, these calendars keep the lights on at my science education nonprofit Skype a Scientist! We make science fun and accessible by matching scientists with classrooms, scout troops and libraries for free. In our home base in Philly we connect community groups to resources to support biodiversity as neighborhoods, via habitat creation and community education. As part of that effort, we create biodiversity-themed murals too!
Reblogs and blazes extremely appreciated. Grants are harder to come by than ever and these calendars keep our mission alive 💙🐌💙
For a donation, a local cat rescue organization made giant cutouts of donors’ cats’ heads, and carried them in the Pride parade a couple of weeks ago. After the parade, the donors were welcome to claim their giant cat head, and I picked ours up today.
Not gonna lie; this is a tiny bit unnerving. The world does not need two of this scapegrace.
It’s mostly awesome, though. We’ll probably move it from window to window so we can spook the neighbors. 😸
i have to make a post about dolly parton i just. need to find the words
i know this sounds like an exaggeration, but as a queer southern kid, dolly parton would have been the only reason i could be convinced to believe in jesus again. she was our princess diana. she was the best of us.
if you don't know east tennessee like i do, it's hard to fathom how we failed and continue to fail our own. large swaths of the population left to rot in illiteracy and addiction with a lack of access to hospitals and infrastructure and education and jobs and a way to get out. to say 'dolly parton is from a small town' is an under-exaggeration to the extreme.
but dolly parton didn't just get out in the way that so many of us dream of doing-- leaving behind the worst places, watching the dust settle in the rear view. instead, she took the place that built her into her arms. she gave millions of free books to children who hungered to learn. she funded a cancer centre in a region without one. she built a foundation that gave monthly stipends to people in the smokies affected by unprecedented wildfires in 2016 which effectively rebuilt the region. she basically built pigeon forge, gave the city an economic stability it never had prior.
and i could enumerate everything she's done elsewhere and otherwise, because it is a list that deserves enumeration, but i need to sit with what she did for the south in a minute and i need everyone here to do the same with me.
so many of us were given up on and continue to be given up on. i see people all the time write off the south as this hellscape wherein every person is an illiterate bigot monster incapable of change, growth, or compassion. it is easy to then justify the mistreatment of these people, these grotesque representations of everything wrong with our society-- it is easy to abandon them.
dolly parton refused to. she could have taken the money, the fame, the luxury and run-- she never did.
and she never backed down when it came to her love. she stood up for the lgbt community long before it was ever popular or even safe to do so as a celebrity. she celebrated drag artists as inspirations. she thoroughly believed we were all god's children. when she spoke of jesus, it was never to invoke his judgement-- it was always to invoke his love.
and that's a wound rural kids have, too, beyond the physical systems of oppression. we are failed by our own who have internalised the narrative that we cannot be saved on earth and thereby have to put stock into a heavenly system that heavily punishes its own, just as we have been punished by our own. jesus' love was taught and weaponised but never practiced, never realised, always a bandaid and never a stitch.
dolly parton spoke of salvation as something we were obligated to give each other, of forgiveness as a deliberate and continual act of explicit love that we were capable of every day. the only thing we ever had was each other, and we could abandon each other as we had been abandoned, or we could love each other as we were never loved. and she chose the latter.
it has been so easy for me, for so many, to leave our country kid past behind the second we could. to mask our accents, to choose the next largest town or city over to claim as our hometown. to dream of worlds larger than the holler, where everyone loves us and no one hurts us ever again, because that could never happen at home.
dolly parton said it will happen here. it did not for so long, and i am so sorry, but it will happen here. i was made here, too, and i love you. i will always love you.
