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Cloud Nomeleons

Platform Bubble: A therapeutic cloud avatar game that simultaneously reflects on how the people we engage with bring us closer to or pull us further away from the kinds of individuals we aspire to become. Along the journey, players traverse ethereal cloud worlds from different literary, electronic and artistic works, both licensed and original.

"Nomeleon" is a portmanteau coined from the words nomad and chameleon. The only variables of each player's visual identity she herself can fully control are the anatomical features and relative size of her avatar. This avatar is a cloud with fluffy extensions mimicking animal head components. At the beginning of the game, the player gets to pick or even draw these extensions at the places where her cloud can grow those cloud ears, cloud pupils, cloud snout and cloud whiskers. The 2D drawn extensions will be rendered into 3D fluffy shapes on the final cloud. The relative size is selected from among a finite set of choices, allowing the player to keep a lower profile or loom over other player clouds depending on her wishes. The cloud color, on the other hand, is programmatically determined through an MBTI questionnaire, though always of some pastel shade. Unlike typical MBTI results, however, the output accommodates ties in any of the four dimensions of personality tested (extraversion—introversion, sensing—intuition, thinking—feeling and judging—perceiving), such that players are not arbitrarily slotted into one or the other side of a dichotomy that should really be a spectrum. Every dimension contributes to the color assignment, so the total number of initial cloud colors possible is (2+1)⁴=81. As detailed further ahead, the cloud color will change to some degree each time with cooperation with other player clouds. To account for organic personality changes over time yet minimize the risk of players submitting insincere answers to gun for particular cloud colors, the player can retake the questionnaire but only after a certain number of months and only when new sets of questions have been made available on the platform.

The cloud worlds are directionally connected to but not visible from each other. We'll dive into the specifics later. But first, on completion of the avatar, the new player is randomly assigned to one of the cloud worlds, where she can select either of two modes: de-stressing or exploring. In both cases, the experience can be enhanced through virtual reality headsets.

In the de-stressing mode, she can join unwinding sessions that are conducted alone or together with masses of player clouds depending on the theme of the cloud world. Two types of rhythmic activities are offered in the company of chill music in these sessions: breathing exercises and rocking naps. Depending on the day and the theme of the cloud world, the breathing exercise can take the form of box breathing, 4-7-8 breathing, pursed lip breathing, alternate nostril breathing, belly breathing, lion's breath, etc. Together with perky verbal instructions, the swelling and shrinking of the cloud face and the shapes of its snout and mouth in a close-up view guide the player through the steps of each breathing exercise. To spur exploration of more cloud worlds, some breathing exercises are exclusive to a small number of cloud worlds, the set of which differs from one rare exercise to another. Any player who opts for a rocking nap has the option to turn her cloud avatar invisible during the nap, leaving only an unlabeled tiny glow of light in her place from other player clouds' perspectives. Nonetheless, she still sees herself as a highly translucent cloud. During the nap, the player cloud adopts soporific motions inspired by visual ASMR and backed by robust human trials (not that any trial already conducted by now is necessarily robust). Brace yourself for what happens next. Players with the financial means can sit back in Internet-connected, body-sized sensory pads that can be draped over hammocks, beds or chairs. The pad motions are synchronized with the cloud motions, ideally inducing sleep in the players by and by. On detection of 15 minutes of sleep through a sensing chest belt strapped to the pad, the system can power down itself to conserve energy. Alternatively, players can set an alarm or broadcast of energetic game music that jolts them awake after a fixed duration.

The exploring mode is where the simulations of identity dynamics come fully alive. A greater incentive for that exploration lies in diverse world-building fed by a broad range of source materials. Cloud textures, contours and arrangements as well as landscapes beneath and game quests vary greatly from level to level. On one level, players drift over William Wordsworth's vales and hills in a world with no non-player cloud and try to spot daffodil fields from afar, over which they then attempt to match the gay flowers' dance steps. On another, they bounce on painter Georgia O'Keeffe's minimalist depictions of cloud expanses backlit from time to time in changing bands of surreal colors, basking in certain elusive bands as quest goals. On yet others, they wander around the meditative electronic game Monument Valley's smoky clouds-surrounded, Escherish platforms to chaperone its forgiveness-seeking princess or they offer up themselves as mattresses for exhausted storks fetching sometimes dangerous babies from personified majestic clouds in animated short Partly Cloudy's busy, baby-bundling thick cloudscapes. Lest we forget, obvious quests would also abound for the deity-transporting clouds in the ancient Eastern novel Journey To The West's cloud world, which can naturally be rendered as a grand 3D ink wash painting. Except for solitariness-themed cloud worlds like Wordsworth's and Georgia O'Keeffe's, quests can be completed through solo or group effort.

Solo effort suffices for physically smaller targets like tinier storks and lighter deities, whereas group effort is essential for larger ones. The caveat is that the core RGB values of each cooperating player cloud will morph to a certain degree in color directions dependent on the MBTI profiles and recent MBTI contacts of player clouds in the group, with the fine RGBA values for the highlights, midtones and shadows of the cloud then adjusted accordingly. What is invisible is subsequent transformation of the MBTIs in this group into a representative value set integrated together with the core RGB into a matrix stored as part of the player profile in the platform database. Upon the player's next cooperation encounter, that value set is to be programmatically retrieved as evaluation of recent MBTI contacts and updated. Different sets of MBTIs have different color interactions. Some MBTI combinations generate no immediate color change but their effect on the value set can affect the player cloud's color change in future cooperation encounters. Achievement of some minimum number of goals grants the player the visa to travel to adjacent levels. Players who meet higher goal thresholds can travel directly to more distant levels. Turbocharge ahead or hang around to work only with buddies with known MBTIs and known player cloud contact histories for artistic safety? It's a dilemma for aesthetes who dread winding up with a sickly avatar color they absolutely detest.

The conundrum does not end there. The visa is valid for only one journey across levels, so players have to earn new visas each time they wish to exit any level. In addition, just as real-life visas are useless without some mode and route of transportation, players must find teleportation points at remote corners of cloud worlds and send themselves upwards or downwards from there. These teleportation points co-locate as a pair on each level. Players can discover the points all by themselves or by querying passerby player clouds by moving their own cloud avatars in such a way that the avatars draw an imaginary question mark in the air, in response to which those passerby clouds would gesture towards the locations through their own movements or perform a fluffy shrug if they are unsure or clueless. No doubt everyone has to be mentally prepared for pranksters. To encourage kindness anyway, the platform logs correct direction-guiding gestures detected through AI and sparks a five-minute undulating glow in each helping player cloud when a guided player cloud successfully lands on another level. The objective, nonetheless, is not to forestall pranks altogether, since this is a game contemplating interpersonal dynamics.

Teleportation occurs after the following sequence: (1) a player cloud chooses a luminous Up or Down arrow floating at those points, (2) spots of lights in a pattern matching the theme of the cloud world manifest nearby, and (3) other player clouds heap themselves around and/or onto the initiating player cloud in the positions of the light spots to form a cloud cairn in the required shape. Cloud colors and player data will be updated once more in accordance with the MBTI profiles and recent MBTI contacts of player clouds in the cairn. If one arrow has been chosen for an occupied teleportation point, only an arrow in the opposite direction will be available for selection at the neighboring point, so color-fussy players have to choose between compromise and perhaps Zen-style patience.

There is no end point for the game. More licensed cloud levels will fluff up the platform universe and sustain interest as other cloud works emerge in the global cultural landscape. So will cloud levels based on new staff and users' idea submissions. Players also have an in-game camera function that facilitates snapshots of their colorful cloud cairns and other cooperation moments. These snapshots are accessible on a virtual personal scrapbook.

Rest assured, though, that if you decide to keep to a core cloud color deemed inferior by others, never mind your glacial game progress, neither the sweet daffodils, the atonement-seeking princess, nor even the almighty Monkey King will judge. Just don't judge any other cloud color either!

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Empyrean Ditties on 2D Bikes

Merch Bubble: A series of cookbooks in which (1) recipes are nestled naturally within light, contemporary fantasy anthologies and (2) food graphics comprise rich illustrations rendered in a fusion of traditional Korean ink wash techniques and whimsical, multi-hued backdrops. Heaven is a place where residents escape starvation by feeding one another, as a parable goes, and this cozy collab shall have writers, artists and culinary experts supporting one another so that the often low-paid crafts of fiction writing and AI-threatened print art can find a breather in the roaring cookbook market, which still reported growth in 2024. No doubt either that Empyrean Ditties On 2D Bikes is the franchise title.

"Empyrean" may strike non-religious people not fond of literary language as an obscure and thus reader-unfriendly word choice but this potential rejuvenation of a poetic vocabulary term sidelined in everyday contexts would symbolize the gifting of a lifeline to the vulnerable crafts. If you have looked up the term and are already familiar with the inspiration for this proposal, you can also see that it is very much a part of the reference to the Korean drama which slice-of-life fantasy subplot practically spells out part (1) of the concept: A lonely man who died at the tender age of five some time after waiting in vain for his mother in front of a church waits on for her as a pastor in heaven. His only parishioner for the most part is the elderly heroine of Heavenly Ever After dispatched to his long-empty, small celestial church to make up for her rude, aggressive habits. She dozes off swiftly at his sermons but brightens quickly at the sight of grub, except that he's a subpar cook. So their church sessions morph into cooking sessions, complete with sun-kissed shots of the hearty meals.

[Spoiler caution w.r.t. original series] Wondering if the heroine might be God's answer to his prayer, the usually prickly pastor calls her "Mom" in a charged moment, yet she obliviously replies that she has been childless all her life. He covers up his embarrassment by claiming that he was pulling her leg. The heroine generously offers to be his adoptive mother or mother in name, to his gruff annoyance, sounding like he is some sad little puppy to her. All the same, the heart that prompts the amnesiac woman to keep turning up at the church to feed the pastor for all sorts of reasons must have known the truth all along.

The cookbooks shall sustain such warmth and hope, and more.

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Ghibli Geometry Homework

Merch Bubble: A petition for Studio Ghibli to best OpenAI by channeling the 2025 trend of cheery citrus-juiced images into an endeavor with more lasting impact — revamping the image of math and captivating young learners through geometry problem sets jazzed up with visuals and story contexts from its films.

Picture the following in their relevant aesthetic backdrops:

Estimate the height Spirited Away's Chihiro successfully descends despite her fear as she speeds down a rickety stairway section with 20 horizontal steps. Each gap between the steps is 5 units in slope and 4 units in width.

Spirited Away's No-Face tries out a circular mask 3 units in radius. Its holes for his eyes are 0.3 units in radius. How many times larger in area is his fake face compared to his fake eyes?

He next tries out a fancy circular mask which outline circumscribes tightly-packed, non-overlapping circles each 0.3 units in radius. The circles are made up of k rings of six circles surrounding one circle. Two of those hexagonally packed circles form holes for his eyes. How many times larger in area is his fake face compared to his fake eyes?

Witch Kiki in Kiki's Delivery Service is on a 10-unit long broomstick tilted at 45 degrees as she takes freshly baked cinnamon rolls to a customer. As she passes by a tall structure, she notices its tip is labeled 10, 000 units. The rolls are in a 2-unit long satchel hanging halfway on the broom. Since the temperature of the air affects how fast pastries go stale, she wonders: How far are the rolls from the ground?

A bunch of kids are squeezing onto the ginormous, fluffy tummy of the furry creature Totoro from My Neighbor Totoro. Predict how many kids can stay on the tummy given the relevant simplifications, assumptions and information. (You already got the drift.)

Make no mistake. There's much virtue in the uncluttered designs of typical math worksheets: faster concept rendering, faster information perception, lower workloads, lower technical requirements and lower production costs. One might sum them up as higher time, resource and cost efficiencies. Add to those pros a potential cultivation of academic asceticism on the learners' part. That would be efficiency as well, in the sense that we meet two student developmental goals (math and discipline) in one shot.

In eyeing these efficiencies, however, teachers and allied industry players may be neglecting their numerator terms, most of which concern learner progress. That is ironically where pure quantitative logic breaks down. We are all emotional creatures. That is all the more so, all things equal, in young people whose brains are still underdeveloped. Looking around, we can see many school leavers who have not matured in time to take full advantage of educational resources temporally and financially accessible only in early life stages. Nor have they met adult figures sufficiently skilled in the elusive art of mathematical motivation. By the time such school leavers gain an appetite for delayed gratification, austere thinking as well as for the inherent beauty in quantitative subjects, adulthood commitments and sociocultural barriers like ageist biases often deter or delay their reentry into the educational system, threatening their scholastic journey and any STEM career trajectory. There is therefore a case to be made for deep yet down-to-earth arts-based engagement of apathetic young learners, many of whom struggle to perceive the relevance of abstract fields like geometry and find math problems in general mundane, through instructor-independent means. The emotional resonance and relatability of Studio Ghibli's works — evinced through their box office successes and the controversial generative art trend applying a warm, effusive and rustic Ghibli style to personal images — would make them powerful helpmates in battles against math hate viruses, which feel as far-reaching as influenza bugs.

Even engagement of kids who will become non-STEM high-fliers can make a huge difference. Ever heard of the phrase "The medium is the message"? Our communication approaches communicate values and signals beyond what our content says. In denying all exuberant expressions of emotion and wonder a place in mathematical materials, even in the face of learners impaired by hopelessness despite their best efforts, adults are reinforcing perceptions of mathematics experts as inflexible, unfeeling and boring nerds. The persistence of those stereotypes in spite of genial, approachable educators painstakingly passing down the magical field's legacy of ingenious problem-solving tactics to students is unfair. And the few pops of color in worksheets that do try to inject fun are not enough to make a strong counter-statement. In the end, non-STEM high-fliers inherit the math as well as the stereotypes, perpetuating the latter in everyday life interactions and media portrayals. Reversal of such perpetuated negativity may spur more kids, especially counterparts who struggle in non-STEM careers and could have flourished in STEM careers, to persevere in the subject and widen their career options.

Ghibli geometry should not distract attention from school-based or educational ecosystem solutions like sharing of best pedagogical practices since they involve different chief solution architects. Content drafting may be accomplished by Studio Ghibli through the blending of its imagery and story contexts with licensed, existing geometry problem sets, leaving only an ideally quick task of expert review to math educators. Moreover, pedagogy discussions and Ghibli-related visuals occupy different influential niches. One speaks to educators, from whom successful translation of advice into action is not guaranteed. The other speaks directly to students.

The existence of entertaining math video clips and games does not obliterate the potential value of Studio Ghibli's math creations either. Unlike graphics that can be transferred onto printouts, video engagement prolongs device usage, already a hot issue of concern in today's youth climate. Moreover, no math clip or game to date has matched the cultural reach and memeability of Ghibli works. The maker of a long string of fantasy films has big shoes no mortal teacher, Tiktoker, YouTuber or software developer can readily fill.

A formidable rival to pop culture, on the other hand, is pop culture itself. This proposal can be generalized to cover a wide array of quantitative subjects and popular screen brands, except that it can be problematic to bring investigations of real-world physics into universes governed by supernatural forces.

By and by, we may even wean captivated students off fancy elements after the relevant aesthetics and narrative structures coax them to develop a fondness for the subjects' intermingling of order and surprises. The capacity for such standalone devotion can stand them in good stead in professional lives dotted all over with mundane but vital to-dos. But first, we need that captivation.

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LotusGPT

Element Hybridization + Transformation Bubble: Can there be loveless love? Is a woman no less impassive than the celebrated male heroes of the Korean masterpieces A Beautiful Mind and Stranger a lesser person?

"Who can appreciate a (pure) lotus flower's possession of only grudges and no passion?" — Line from Tang dynasty poet Lu Guimeng's White Lotus

An overworked nanny in an aristocratic household in a fictional part of ancient East Asia finally catches a break to return to her village, only to find it flattened out in a mudslide. Her four boisterous kids and granny have been fatally trapped in their dingy home, while her husband has drowned in the mud waters in his valiant attempt to reach them. Slumped in confusion, then desperation, then impotent rage and anguish at the edge of a lotus pond nearby, she stares at the beautiful flowers, spitting at how hypocritical it is that these revered plants can rise unblemished from mud whereas the humans she cherishes, also creations of Nature, can only perish. All the years she has toiled away changing the cloth diapers of others' infants and feeding them instead of her own with her milk have been in vain. The thunderstorm that triggered the mudslide may be over but her streams of tears ripple the pond surface like rain that knows no end.

The bereaved woman stays in that position for three days. By the time her last tear dries, though, a mysterious calm has washed over her. She notices the petals of the lotus closest to her subtly, rhythmically opening and closing like a warbling child. When she plucks the lotus and pries open its center, the roars, shrieks and wails previously in her heart burst forth from the inside of the lotus. That is the genesis of the Mu Sect, mu being its reference to emotional nothingness (mushim, mushin, etc. in various languages and dialects).

In the decades to come, parents who would have sent their emotionally troubled daughters to nunneries, as was the tradition, send them to the sect instead, where lotus cultivars descending from the one in the pond absorb the emotions of anyone concentrating her energy before them for days. After that self-purification period, each member carries the lotus wherever she goes to absorb further emotions. Being free from wants yet not forbidding each other from personally profitable enterprises, the Mu Sect is not plagued by corruption problems monasteries and nunneries have been mired in and not wholly reliant on donations to sustain its members. Compared to traditional nuns, the girls have the liberty to work in profitable occupations to earn money for their families. Although the flowers work on males too, boys sent to the sect are few and far between due to a higher societal tolerance of negative male emotions. Moreover, there is a stronger stigma among males about being seen as emotionally weak than there is among females. Families also view girls, with their lower earning potential, as more expendable than boys, who are expected to carry on the family line.

In any event, membership in the Mu Sect is not without its own troubles. The public regards the emotionless females as cold freaks, not merely because of the unsettlingly robotic mannerisms but also because of the loving, tender qualities valued of the gender. Even those who are more gender-progressive criticize the sect: How can one make correct moral decisions without the capacity for empathy and emotional imagination? The sect responds by drilling a set of universally accepted moral tenets into new entrants and putting them through a periodically updated curriculum about the emotional lives, needs and vulnerabilities of people in the wider society. It is definitely impossible to foresee every decision-making scenario members will encounter. On the flip side, their highly principled, reasoned approach to life means they do not engage in cruel behavior on a whim. Such consistency, along with their inherent selflessness, also make them valuable assets to families and organizations employing their services.

Nevertheless, mistrust and persecution campaigns persist. It does not help that fatal misjudgments by Mu Sect members do occur, albeit with decreasing frequency, and that several advisors and financial backers from the general public turn out to be misanthropic ideologues or avaricious heavyweights who dream of a perfectly compliant, undemanding female workforce. Disentangling itself from the advisors and backers has been a fraught process threatening political fallout and messy debts for the organization. And sometimes, clear answers to the definitions of misdeeds or to questions of whether and when ends can justify means cannot be found in any universal moral code. Haters ambush members, mutilate the carried lotuses and even storm the Mu headquarters. Quickly, the sect enlists the assistance of sympathetic martial arts sects, which tend to preach ascetic lifestyles and strict discipline themselves, to train its members in fighting skills. The tension between the haters and the sect never goes away but rather reaches an equilibrium point after all these years.

It is in the midst of such violence that we meet the series' actual leads, Jun and Snowless. Jun's huge, once-esteemed family of scholars, government officials and their relatives have been condemned to slave labor in the rough countryside since his childhood days after his father was framed for collusion with a foreign enemy. He is on the run for smuggling himself out of the place in a bid to uncover the truth and seek justice for his family. Snowless is a Mu Sect fighter fending off a hate gang as she searches for a kidnapped fellow sect member in a maze of tunnels. She has adopted a pseudonym to avoid implicating her family in her work. The two of them encounter each other and work together to save the kidnappee.

On exchanging their personal stories, Snowless expresses more thanks for Jun's help. She volunteers to shelter and assist him in his investigation. The difficulties of gaining access to repositories and other official buildings as an ordinary person, let alone an ostracized sect member or a fugitive, however, complicate their task. Discovery of a man in her lodging will also scandalize her family. But dispassionate rationality leads her to a solution that absolutely stuns Jun but no well-seasoned dramaland adventurer: living as husband and wife.

Let's rewind to Snowless' teenage days for a minute. Snowless' influential family was one of those which did not see their daughters' initiation into the Mu Sect as a barrier to marriage. With their vast economic capital as bait, they secured a political marriage between her and the similarly teenage son of a social climbing merchant. This groom, however, favored a dreamy servant girl over an artificially saccharine and otherwise zombiefied wife of a more powerful background than him. The lovebirds eloped. When she spotted him in a faraway village during a mission for the sect, he was already father to a sickly little girl. Yet divorce was as unthinkable as teenage marriages were the norm in that era. Even if both families would consent, the groom's snobbish parents would sooner compel him to marry another rich wife than accept the servant girl or her unlucky daughter. So Snowless has kept the couple's whereabouts to herself. It so happens that Jun shares the groom's physical features and more than 10 years have passed by since anyone else in the two families' networks has seen the groom.

Disguising Jun as her husband, Snowless takes the chance to give the families closure over the disappearance through his adoption of the identity, foreseeing an avenue to stage an act of migration for Jun on achievement of his goal. But her moral calculation only allows her lifesaving lie to extend to this point. Their official identification as spouses must not be perjury too. And upholding the precept of the sanctity of all marriages, Snowless earnestly declares to Jun that she will care for him in every aspect as a real wife. Jun is dumbfounded.

Fulfill her role she does, staying up all night during their investigative travels, where they must forgo the company of servants, to pack his food containers with pretty, colorful snacks and mend every tiny hole on his clothes. Every time Jun reaches for any of his bundles, it has invariably been tied up by Snowless with lovely bows informed by a meticulous study of everyday aesthetics that makes up for her incapability to feel beauty or ugliness. Nestled inside each bundle is a note of reminder or a perky line from known poetry, rendered in neat, delicate calligraphy. Her insistent dutifulness simultaneously flusters and troubles him. So despite temptation from her flawless porcelain complexion and svelte figure, he resolutely draws the line at physical intimacy. Would the privileged young heiress have let her life revolve so much around him if she had not fallen ill and her parents had not given up her heart to a persecuted sect? He does not want to take advantage of a lady robbed of emotional autonomy. It is bad enough that he escapes enslavement only to inadvertently enslave someone else.

That is all the more reason for Jun to speed up his quest for justice, so that Snowless can return to her life. But setbacks and roundabouts naturally abound. Jun keeps a stoic facade, glaring and cursing at the heavens above only when he is all alone. Nonetheless, Snowless eventually spots him all bent down beside a desolate brook, clutching his head. She approaches him, and he, seeing that he cannot even keep up his tiny act in front of her, much less rescue his family, finally breaks down. She cradles his head, intently listening to his self-loathing vitriol and fears.

When Jun is done, he asks her with a resigned expression, "All right. Which bombastic poet or classic are you going to cite from your boundless memory bank this time?"

Snowless smiles, "I won't cite anything. If reason dictates that space is the best prescription for your unfurling emotional chaos right now, I'll preserve the silence you need."

Surprised, Jun looks more closely at her. Yet she is merely smiling with only her rosy lips and not her blank eyes, as always.

She continues, "Although there are numerous cases of political conspiracy, malignment, circumnavigation and name-clearing in history and the books, you are your own person, with a set of granular external circumstances and inner experience no subject of any account perfectly mirrors. On reflection, I won't stress you with comparisons to literary anecdotes anymore, even though that is the convention in my family's circle."

Gradually, Jun grows used to pouring out his woes and thoughts to her, while hiding from rain in some broken temple or deserted hut, while gazing over landscapes from cliffs and unsecured towers, and while resting on pairs of hammocks head-to-head. However weary her body is or late the hours are, Snowless never misses a word and never injects one unless he mixes up his facts, requests for her input or teeters on the edge of a breakdown. Sometimes, Jun experiences a revelation or brainwave mid-babble, and they work on how it can refine their plan.

As his feelings for her develop like reckless weed, Jun scans Snowless' countenance for a flicker of genuine emotion. But unlike his, her facade never breaks. He searches her eyes whenever the touch of her gaze or the thoughtfulness of her words warm up his body, yet those eyes are as empty as ever. When she asks about his stares, he returns her performative smile with a lonely, sad smile. Inwardly, he mocks himself for a one-sided love of an emotionally untouchable goddess who can never feel nor reciprocate his love. He is still a slave, a slave to an impossible matching game of the hearts.

Over an obligatory course of mystery hairpin bends, thriller elevated highways and horror gridlocks, Jun encounters multiple other victims of politics who see themselves as slaves of circumstances in one way or another. Regrettably, they are too immersed in their individual pains to hear each other out properly, not to mention commiserate, spot the common root of their troubles or band together to fight the system. So many people come, rant and go, whereas Snowless is perpetually nearby, perpetually ready to listen.

The campaign to bring the truth to light wraps up in resounding success. But from the shadows they are now relegated to, the vengeful political foes responsible for framing Jun's family dispatch an army of assassins after him and Snowless. At a perilous juncture, Snowless urges Jun to escape first while she stalls the assassins, reasoning that he has the potential to rise to high office by virtue of his family's illustrious legacy and thereby better the lives of many more people than she can as a member of the Mu Sect. Unable to tolerate her unflappable demeanor any more, Jun yells at her subservience. Angrily confessing his feelings, he tells her that there is no way he can function as a normal human being, much less enter officialdom, if anything untoward befalls her. What's more, if she had not undergone the lotus treatment, she would not have foolishly served as his wife, and playing dice with her life is surely a bigger decision than marrying him? She should comply with the wishes of her real self neutered by the lotus.

As expected, there is no shift in Snowless' expression even as she gives his words a great deal of thought. Her eventual reply, though, takes Jun aback, "Is my real self worth your rejection of my potential sacrifice then?"

"..."

"Let's leave it to chance," Snowless moves her lotus towards Jun. "Pry open its center, and hear for me what my real self thinks."

Jun stares at the lotus, steels his nerves and pulls apart some of the petals and stamen. A torrent of shrill voices charge at him.

"Buggy-eyed." "Feckless mimicry of a man." "Who did this pathetic slave think he was lashing out at me like I'm a toddler?" "You mean you cannot live on without living off a woman."

Stumbling backwards in utter shock, Jun looks up at the ever-calm Snowless with tears of betrayal. We see his mental reconstruction of their months of interactions, her parts replaced by images of a spiteful, haughty Snowless. Lotus bearers can lie out of necessity, but lotuses themselves do not lie.

The present Snowless plainly states, "The answer is clear. You who care about my lotus self rescind your rejection. I who have forsaken my lotus self long ago need to comply with my logical analysis. Run and live well. You'll find true love and support someday."

She swiftly heads for their adversaries, gleaming sword in hand. With a heavy heart, Jun runs in the opposite direction, away from the rosy illusions of the past episodes. Conflicted thoughts race through his mind as he races through the noisy, thick woods. Who is the real self? The one who feels, the one who contemplates, the one who wills, the one who acts, or all of them combined? Or maybe, the question should be who matters most? If it is the one who wills, though, is he in reality in love with the influential figures whose values are imparted to Mu Sect members? On the other hand, perhaps pre-lotus Snowless made a conscious choice to adopt those values when she joined the sect, knowing what their teachings are. He has never met her, but she is surely not much less intelligent than post-lotus Snowless. But what if her emotional turmoil and youth then clouded her judgment and compromised her autonomy? How much is this relevant, though? The irrational weeds in his heart have always been bending towards the rational, post-lotus Snowless, never the her in the lotus.

Amid the thicket of thoughts, a notion glows in his mind like the full moon overhead. Killing someone by conscious omission is still killing. He does not want to be one of those narrow-sighted, thin-skinned men who kill women they believe despise them when there are greater problems, of governance and society, everybody should be combating. Snowless' utilitarian logic drives him mad, yet her unfaltering concern for the bigger picture at a time when most people look out only for themselves warms his heart in contrast to those men. Prey to warmth he falls. Jun looks at a familiar bend ahead with grave determination.

The assassins pursue Snowless till the edge of the woods, where a vast plain with nowhere to hide awaits. But before their widening smirks reach their ears, a cloaked figure from among them pushes Snowless ahead, "Go! The city walls are not far!"

She recognizes Jun's eyes despite his mask and assassin clothes. Knowing now he will insist on being the one who stays behind to fend off the guys, she immediately drags him along as she sprints off onto the plain. In time, the city walls become visible. A swarm of flame arrows, however, rush towards the pair, while transforming the plain into a sea of fire.

Snowless looks at Jun, her still tranquil eyes and smile lit by the red-orange lights all around.

"If there is heaven, I'll petition for you to meet a girl of your dreams in your next lifetime."

Jun looks at her with wretched, protesting eyes which heat matches the rising temperatures around them. He wants to at least embrace her for once but who can he really embrace?

The red-orange sea rages on before silhouettes of the retreating triumphant assassins. When we next see the pair, they have fallen onto the ground. Tongues of fire creep onto their lifeless bodies. Burnt off by the flames, a petal flutters away, exposing another segment of the lotus center. To the caressing tune of a consequently unleashed stream of melodic whispers which female voice the audience instantly recognizes, pollen from the segment drifts over to form a translucent, sparkling mist draping over Jun and only afterwards Snowless herself. The fire retreats from the golden mist. The whispers dissipate.

Slowly, his chest starts to heave again, though he remains deeply unconscious. The credits roll after this close-up shot.

Check out the alt text of all images.

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Many-Worlds Liminal Yoga

Physical Experience Bubble: A breathtaking network of yoga complexes and outdoor yoga locations in which thematically attired participants practice the exercise in immersive and spacious environments of transcendental aesthetic beauty that brings them leaps closer to mind-liberating alternate realities. This collaboration is fertile on multiple dimensions:

Synergy and symbiosis can generate more income opportunities for artists and storytellers who are currently precariously employed and for yoga gurus.

The breathing in, rather than mere sightseeing or browsing, of art in any form potentially sculpts artistic experiences which relatively kinesthetic elements leave culture enthusiasts and content consumers with more enduring mindset resets. Otherwise, we may speak of creations that offer food for thought, but the truth may well be that our grounded, generally sensible instincts switch us back to reality mode soon after we turn our eyes away even though breaking out of bad habits and prejudices can do everyone a world of good.

Performing yoga in fantastical settings even further removed from everyday life than studios with Zen-inspired designs is likely the strongest proposition for yoga holdouts. Some people have the perception that activities elevating mindfulness compel acceptance and hyperawareness of a wretched environment that is already causing them sensory overload, sleeplessness and general pain and frustration. It does not help them that ordinary yoga studios are often small outlets nestled right next to the detested hustle and bustle of the surroundings. They are not convinced either that soundproofing, minimalist aesthetics and meditation are sufficient to remove the acuity of location awareness. Although the ideal way of being is to be able to find peace in even the most chaotic surroundings, picking up yoga in immersive art can be a stepping stone towards greater mental capacity building.

Settings can be three-dimensional assemblages of either pure art or scenes from various types of fiction: literature, cinema, television, stage productions, etc. Behold the following examples. [Spoiler caution w.r.t. various source materials]

Monet's Spa: Participants in 19th-century gym suits, updated as necessary for yoga functionality, perform the exercise on synthetic, pavilion-sized lily pads connected by inconspicuous glass walkways atop an expansive, blooming pond as branches of towering, lush greenery sway around them. Calming floral scents, leaves' swishing sounds and trickling water, absent in typical digital art projections, can accompany yoga moves. For the safety of the participants, the pond is kept shallow while the lily pads feature the raised edges of natural lily pads. The yoga instructor is positioned on Claude Monet's Japanese footbridge. Note however that, for photos and real-life constructions alike, it is difficult to reproduce the shimmeringly lively, moving aesthetics of the Giverny pond scenery the way Monet conjured through his genius brush strokes. All the same, we should strive to approximate the mood of the art.

Parallel Piranesis: Participants in loose sportswear printed with varying quotes from Susanna Clarke's philosophical fantasy novel Piranesi are divided into two stately rooms, where they engage in yoga under the warm gazes of statues of royalty whose faces are modeled after participants in the other room and whose palms hold dioramas of places from various works of fiction (Library of Babel, The Shire, folding cities, bulk beings' tesseract, etc.). The colors of the writings and clothes are reversed on the instructor. Statue faces are based on submitted photographs, modeled using non-drying and thus reusable clay with the ideal assistance of artificial intelligence and 3D printing, and affixed to figures of corresponding gender identities and life stages. Mismatches between participant numbers and statue numbers owing to limitations (e.g. space, portability and economics) can be smoothed over with the help of backup clay faces of underappreciated customer service staff in the event of statue surplus and a participant-face lottery system in the event of statue shortfall. On exiting their rooms and meeting each other, the two groups of yoga participants find themselves in the kind of situation Clarke's eponymous protagonist enters near the end of the novel, except that their mutual consciousness put to rest his regret of not sharing the tenderness of arts with the world-weary:

People were walking up and down on the path. An old man passed me. He looked sad and tired. He had broken veins on his cheeks and a bristly white beard. As he screwed up his eyes against the falling snow, I realised I knew him. He is depicted on the northern wall of the forty-eighth western hall. He is shown as a king with a little model of a walled city in one hand while the other hand he raises in blessing. I wanted to seize hold of him and say to him: In another world you are a king, noble and good! I have seen it! But I hesitated a moment too long and he disappeared into the crowd.

Moon Binary: Participants donning flowery, touristy garments designed for yoga purposes do the exercise in an indoor space underneath, no surprise here, a pair of shining moon structures. The moons' appearances and other elements of the setting and instructor garb change across the sessions, immersing everybody in a diverse range of contemporary art and narratives where moongazers would see double in the sky: Alexander Calder's kinetic sculpture Two Moons (see-sawing crescents, wall panels covered by his influencing peer Piet Mondrian's clean grids and primary colors, instructor in red full-body suit), Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami's magic realist opus 1Q84 (a typical moon and a smaller green moon, butterfly glass house decor, instructor wearing white gloves of Japanese cab drivers and tie sewn onto white top), autistic professor Dora M. Raymaker's disability allegory sci-fi novel Hoshi And The Red City Circuit (silver and red moons, backdrop of jagged ultra-modern skyline with crimson clouds, instructor in bolero jacket and steel-toed boots like the neurodivergent heroine), Korean universe-crossing drama series W – Two Worlds Apart and one of its posters (one full moon against pastel blue sky and another against pastel pink sky, carpeted grand stair structures and backdrop of fairytale-like cathedral, instructor in manhwa-style makeup), Korean time-travel drama series Twinkling Watermelon (moon becoming two, glowing guitar decorations, instructor in 1990s Korean streetwear), German-British-American sci-fi epic film Cloud Atlas (full moon and crescent against dark purple sky, rocks and tents on sand-color carpet and backdrop of sea, instructor in its islander garb), etc. Participants will not be informed beforehand the title, genre or cultural background of the work referenced in any session, or whether it belongs to "high" culture or to "pop" culture. The point is to encourage exploration of unfamiliar works and reflect on the extent to which preconceptions and summary characterizations are valid.

Moon Supreme's Heart: In an unmistakable callback to the anti-bigotry theme in ancient fantasy drama series Cang Lan Jue (some possible interpretations and layers of meaning: parting of the orchid from the grayish greeness, parting of fairy heroine Xiaolanhua from devil hero Dongfang Qingcang) / Love Between Fairy and Devil, participants dress up as members of the fairy and devil tribes of the show before working out on a contemplative grass island atop a vast mirror-like lake. To ensure a good mix of fairy participants and devil participants, there is to be random assignment of unisize costumes. The instructor naturally dresses up as the devil lord Moon Supreme and positions herself under a sprawling tree, lit with yoga music-responsive, vein-like green string lights during winter and bursting into pink blossoms during flowering seasons. The entire setup, sans the participants, is the show's portrayal of contemplative sessions and psychological growth stages in his heart. Yoga sessions can be held outdoors if location scouting is successful and/or indoors all year round on props and reflective, water-like epoxy flooring.

Jedi Temple: Why should people from victimized societal groups always be under the loving protection and guidance of dominant groups whenever the two encounter and never the other way round? Yet those from the latter group have felt humiliated and resentful when they are at the receiving end of that reversal. Wookiees may have been an enslaved species capable of communicating only in growls and roars but they are simultaneously clever makers of flying vehicles and self-sacrificing heroes who save some Lasats from genocide in the Star Wars franchise. Following the steps of a Jedi yoga instructor in a suitable Wookiee fursuit, participants in Padawan robes cultivate inner peace through the exercise in a tranquil Jedi temple chamber. To stay in character yet overcome the language barrier, the Jedi Wookiee instructor shall have teaching assistants in the forms of Jedi from more human-like alien races like Mirialan and Theelin.

The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. (Ernest Hemingway) There is a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in. (Leonard Cohen)

Luminescent Scars: As light pours into a cavernous space, participants in ballet tights practice their yoga poses within its ceramic-like, curved walls crisscrossed with fracture lines. Powdered gold, copper, brass, silver or platinum fill the lines. The instructor, in shimmering tights, is one of the bundles of rays that have descended to the weary and wounded. Shadows of other scar lines flit across participants' bodies from time to time in acknowledgment of feelings all around, before transforming into waves of light. The above quotes reproduced by Critical Dance from program notes of Aurum, a ballet set in motion before such patterned backdrops, have told us the art form kintsugi's ideal of embracing and growing more beautiful through broken parts. Ceramic surfaces portrayed across the sessions hail from a number of masterful or storied wares.

Sun Underfoot: The Sun feels like a villain in increasingly brutal summers over the globe. Let global warming work to our collective advantage for a change by giving us a physical practice target as we learn to mentally rise over our adversaries, be they oppressive bosses or personal paranoias. Participants styled as early Mesopotamian miners and an instructor styled as a farmer from that era work out on wide cypress planks of a platform tied with ropes of flax and enclosed like a balcony. Alternating among these workout planks are soil-coated planks from which artificial vegetables bend sideways and downwards in the direction of a glowing sun underneath the platform. The soft, golden orange hues of the orb's rays peeking through the planks accentuate spirited stretched limbs in this location pictured in Ted Chiang's short story Tower Of Babylon.

Hidden Tibetan Sea Flower Field: Among thin, translucent red synthetic plants known as Tibetan sea flowers atop a surface mimicking a frozen body of water in the middle of a quiet, snowy landscape, participants in Central Asian ethnic garb practice yoga under the directions of instructors dressed up as sci-fi action drama series Tibetan Sea Flower / Adventure Behind The Bronze Door's enigmatic, unemotional orphaned youth Zhang Qiling and his self-sacrificing mother Baima. Baima was a terminally ill young non-Han woman forcibly separated from Qiling by his father's formidable Han Chinese family. Believing he would not grow up well-adjusted in the demanding, cruel household, Baima begged lamas in a Central Asian temple (though a Sichuan temple in real life) to put her in suspended animation using the rare plants so that mother and son could reunite someday. Despite knowing she might not wake up, she pushed through with the plan to give Qiling the chance to see her alive, from which she wanted him to feel however little love that lingered on in the world. In the end, their long-awaited reunion was a literally muted affair lasting only three days, with Baima unable to hear a word or move a muscle, not even her tight-shut eyelids or lips. We are informed through the narration and the short story the sequence has been based on, however, that she knew from the follow-through of the promise his presence. Qiling held her stiff hand until she expired at long last at the end of the three days. A crushing masterpiece of storytelling that understands less can be more. Stretch out among the Tibetan sea flowers with the hope that warmth can transcend staggering time and communication barriers. What the yoga itself is less likely to do for you but is helpful to pack along wherever you adventure is a reminder that small acts of love and kindness can be worthwhile even if the other party does not seem to reciprocate.

Proto: Make way for aerial yoga. Participants perform the yoga in flowy, visually busy, ombré battle apparel, donned by the soul-transmigrating, demon-fighting couple in ancient fantasy drama series Eternal Night Star River / What Do We Mean The Official English Title Exists, in a bright, seemingly boundless white space indoors with flowing calligraphic proto-writings on the floor. The silk harnesses are similarly ombré. Hanging securely at a safe margin above the airborne participants are more of the writings. The instructor? An immobile, mossy yet modern-style stone panda embedded with a loudspeaker. It's another occasion that calls for teaching assistants, so staff dolled up as magnified versions of the show's cheering, mushroom-like white dust demons step up to the role. So what if fate were written in the stars? Anyone is free to sculpt and inspire streams of stars. The story of being summoned into a wondrous fictional universe as the secret muse of a mega-popular author trapped in his novel may sound like an office rat's self-aggrandizing fantasy, but it is true that we can motivate change on some scale through our own courage, positivity and genuine concern for someone. When the yoga / transmigration game host ("System") behind the scenes spots demoralized or half-hearted participants, she warmly reminds them through the loudspeaker that they need not be side characters in their own stories.

Dream Crew's Dream: Ramp up the airiness. Participants in satin yoga outfits which textures and shades of predominantly blue, green and purple call to mind the Inside Out films' mind workers suspend themselves in aerial yoga in an indoor space decked out with pastel balloons and covered all over with effervescent, crayon-like surfaces featuring a cotton candy-colored palette. Filming equipment (that have outlived their use on actual production sets and are stably erected) on the side remind us that this is a studio, specifically a dream-making studio in a person's mind. Before each session, the participants are polled on the famous (but uncontroversial) personality they want the instructor to emerge as, who performs so on the day itself from a towering door etched in faint white outlines. While wrangling over the shoot for another dream, they have been miraculously transported into this version of the studio in the harried personality's lucid dream, where they excitedly become his or her reassuring chaperones in a collective retreat for inner peace. Regardless of differences in vision and values, we always have a common loved one's best interests at heart.

Koiet: Are you an office drone who feels seen by the romance film Vertigo in which a graphic designer unhappy at work dreamily gazes at a rope access technician working on the facade of the skyscraper her office is located high on? But you're also wary of over-romanticizing a dangerous job exposed to the elements. Or maybe you're a rope access technician yourself and would love to design your perfect work location. Here's the middle ground. In a wide, temperature-controlled indoor space which ceiling and walls have the same color gradient shifting from teal to brown to gold as the sky in the film's last scene, participants in bright red jackets resembling the technician's attire practice yoga on upsized window suspension platforms surrounded by wool clouds. The instructor is situated before an anti-glare glass-filtered light source representing the Sun. Peeking out under the clouds are Japanese carp streamers bouncing in a choreographed wind. These carp streamers are not part of the film but anchor the setting in an impossible context to reduce the risk of people copying over the stunts to locations of actual tall height. To lower the risk further, Koiet is open only to adults.

Windows Yoga: Outdoors participants in yoga wear which stunning colors echo the red, blue and green of Bella, the parrot of the mysterious and Peter Pan-like magician Ri-eul in musical drama series Annarasumanara / The Sound Of Magic, flex their moves on horizontally lying, resilient window-like glass panes arrayed on a pavement comprising of grayish brown bricks. The idea is prancing on a wall in defiance of gravity. High schoolers in the opening musical sequence break out in dance in the same setting. The yoga instructor is decked out in the shades of the iridescent blue butterfly in the series. Here, the ridiculousness factor is a sarcastic tip of the magician's top hat to the rat race's absurdities. The series finale reveals that teenage Ri-eul was a hyper-stressed star student who developed the extreme paranoia and forlornness grownup Ri-eul has been saving youngsters from through his uplifting yet economically useless craft.

Black-Eye Exile: Put into cold storage? Not even the end of the world need spell the end of your unfurling dreamscape. Add a drizzle of good old cod liver oil. Under enchanting aurora simulations and cool hues of mood lighting and surrounded by mountain sculptures, an instructor in a panda onesie  — not a more show-faithful mascot costume hindering yoga movements — leads participants with a horn-like tuft of hair each in busting out yoga movements on a snow-patterned carpeted floor. The tuft of hair is to be that way not because workplace drama series Today's A Good Day To Keep Going / Never Give Up's (add oil being the idiomatic phrase for keep going in its native language) horn-haired Bai Mashuai will ever be successfully exiled by any of his exploitative higher-ups to their panda-themed corporation's polar branch office, but because you believe that no entity, sporting dark circles or not, would have stopped the bright-eyed princeling from brushing up on some skill wherever work siestas of any variety take him.

Citadel at the End of Time: Good heavens. The end of the world is too close to home for comfort as well? Here's emotionally honest yoga at the end of time. Participants in sweaters which ruffled dark purple textures project scifi-mythology drama series Loki's stormy, all-eating being Alioth seek retreat in their meditative poses in the moody, majestic said citadel, as a nebula and branching timelines serenely curl and stretch outside its ornate windows. The instructor is styled as different Loki variants in different sessions. Anyone looking forward to an alligator instructor-Loki? While hanging around before sessions start, everybody is welcome to check out the citadel's shelves of books on time, astronomy and world cultures and philosophies. The Loki variants are so going to sneak in titles on weight loss regimens for grapes-wannabe monsters.

Belief System: How about escaping into ourselves, where some of the balms and causes for our troubles lie? Next to a glowing blue waterfall cascade, participants who are each splotched in colorful bodily paint standing for all emotions in the Inside Out films practice yoga underneath a canopy of luminescent threads that represent strands of beliefs. Around the canopy is tranquil water on which bright orbs carrying images of memories float. Before the start of each session, the participants are free to release orbs doodled with their own memories into the water. It's a hive mind harbor. Who shall the instructor dress up as? An artist donning a messily pigment-stained apron with flexible material and split-leg slits that facilitate yoga stretches. Embrace inner flaws — but not if anyone starts messing with the yoga network's staff, customers or property.

High-Dimensional Blues: Voyages hold limited value when voyagers filter their experiences through the same set of metaphysical paradigms. Give our brains an enthralling perspective workout as a reminder in this exceptionally challenging set design. Participants surrounded by blue ambulatory trees on a blue grass turf put on futuristic lightweight astronaut suits and carry out yoga in front of a wide, invisible sphere that punctuates a swath of the vegetation. Animatronics helpfully play the trees in this alien habitat from sci-fi giant Liu Cixin's horror novel Death's End, and character Guan Yifan has noted that the helmets can be removed since Planet Blue's atmosphere supports human life. So, where's the challenge? From some angles, cross-sections of plant parts in contact with the sphere's surface are visible. In later sessions, participants find themselves suddenly inside the sphere — actually a kind of warped point in space whose counterparts are encountered in war-torn Constantinople and spacecraft in the book, but which is imagined to intersect the planet at some point in its long history for our yoga quest of inner calm — and thus surrounded instead by an exposed view of all the layers and interior details of the blue vegetation, right down to water coursing along the vascular systems. We are viewing a three-dimensional landscape from the vantage point of four-dimensional space, the way hypothetical beings from two-dimensional worlds within which they can only perceive lines would gain a bird-eye view of reality upon their introduction to three-dimensional space. All space garments are swapped out for cloth designs depicting the layered structures of the original garments and the human body. These designs assume, however, that everybody is a chill yoga practitioner who has grown to ignore distracting anatomical details, so only a limited level of cluttered granularity is necessary and content such as subcutaneous facial structures and minor-unfriendly visual information can be omitted. Welcome the instructor, Sophon, a graceful yet feisty humanoid in Japanese clothing (in part or in full because the term for the fictional intelligent particles she is named after sounds similar to the Japanese name Tomoko in Chinese). Someday, though, Liu should have the privilege of peering into higher-dimensional views of his brilliant books from warped points in gender space.

The Great Before: Wish you could restart your life? You can't, but the rebirth of your mind is a close possibility. The gentle rolling knolls and plains of animation film Soul's The Great Before, hypnotic in their ethereal hues of purple and blue, may give our primeval brains cues to shed some trapping beliefs and counter-productive mental habits that we have accumulated over the decades. Participants in light bluish green yoga wear are the souls, while the instructor has sheer outer sleeves referencing the translucent soul counselors in the film. Teaching assistants from Mystics Without Borders attend to inattentive students, who must have mentally drifted off to The Great Void. Pixar is not responsible for that hitherto unknown realm.

Dove Yggdrasill: Maybe the appeal of liminality to you lies not in its proximity to any preconceived place, real or fantastical, but in its distancing from all such places. You cannot be filed away neatly into any box. You love nature but are not a nature person in practical terms. You appreciate art and narratives but value your brain muscles too much to be a mindless drone only celebrating others' creativity. Why, no existing work by anyone can quite spell out your soul's aspired refuge. This is your chance as a valued customer of the network. Submit your own setting concept to Soapbending Yoga, Inc., the neo-exercise organization presently nowhere to be found, which will match customers behind selected submissions with suitable creatives to realize the visions. Dove Yggdrasill is one potential vision, featuring an environment no scene in any medium proffers — participants in chic, snowish yoga wear perform aerial yoga on harnesses hanging on sturdy panels that double as the lowest branches of a stylized world tree. The same goes for the instructor, positioned nearest the trunk, in this most egalitarian visual format. The gnarled tree can be predominantly white, with undertones enhancing its sculptural look. Wind chimes composed of origami white doves hang securely on tree branches away from the harnesses. A vibrant monotone green background cheekily evokes the feels of a sanitized commercial shoot, because consumerism is your habitat during paid yoga sessions. The overall symbolism is connections to and remembrance of antiquity and biodiversity even in modernist seclusion. But do not overlook the finishing touch, a stretching exercise for liminality's limits that ends up interrogating liminality itself, as we shall wonder about complete independence from contemporary creative culture and put on the front of each yoga outfit an appetizing graphic of the key lime pie Loki's Time Variance Authority characters bond over during work breaks.

Among the many spanners in the works are, first, the tendency of "high" and "pop" cultures alike to carry themes and elements beyond positive ones celebrated in the yoga sessions and, second, the liberty of yoga participants to twist our intended significance of elements even within the narrow visual context presented. For one thing (or another thing, if you recall a gender portrayal concern above), does Haruki Murakami's oeuvre trivialize extramarital affairs? In the butterfly glasshouse session, will participants be walking into a dream of humble oneness with nature and embracing mono no aware, or fervently throwing themselves into an embrace of vigilante justice since those two ideals are espoused by a safe house founder who orders assassinations in 1Q84? Messaging conflicts are an area that certainly needs more work in this proposal.

At the same time, however, sessions must not be run like cults. No interpretation of any work should be treated as immune from criticism or as exclusive of all other interpretations. Staff and settings can encourage but never order participants how to feel or reflect. All individuals' dignity as autonomous cognitive beings must be recognized and respected. In any event, a hard-sell approach would likely be counterproductive, while rejection of criticism and of what-ifs increases the risk of unrigorous, insular thinking in the network's operations and arts discourse. And such discourse is ultimately of lesser importance than participants' well-being, which is the sole focus of all teaching staff. Their extensive knowledge of source materials only serves to provide imaginative context and address ethical dilemmas. Chances are you can properly reason and feel for various artistic works only after you've taken care of yourself to a certain extent.

Relevant licensing requirements apply. Where works are used in the absence of applicable licensing regimes (e.g. art sourced in-house), commission fees or salaries will be paid to creatives depending on the nature of collaboration. In all outdoors settings, care must be taken to apply for all necessary location permits, avoid environmental damage (including any repetitive trampling of plants) and minimize disruption to nearby residents and businesses too. Although the hassle as well as general expenses can be dramatically cut by substituting light projections or augmented reality for all backdrop elements, the resulting effects will not be as immersive and powerful as three-dimensional set pieces. Moreover, eye strain from augmented reality undercuts health benefits.

It is also possible to simplify the network by forsaking direct artist participation and running only pop-up yoga events in artworks' and books' real settings and filming locations like The Lord Of The Rings' Hobbiton Movie Set, the Harry Potter movie series' Alnwick Castle and East Asian historical series' Yongin Daejanggeum Park and Hengdian World Studios with authority clearance and crowd management. That has the additional benefit of leaving the difference between real-life and onscreen ambience as the only gap between participants' reality and artistic or narrative reality. Simpler still, as some may advocate, we can discard cultural elements altogether and settle on scenic venues in general. However, those alternatives not only cuts down income opportunities for creatives and narrows the diversity of works referenced, if at all, but also reduces the richness of the yoga experience and makes the arts-based immersive yoga proposed even less accessible to time-strapped, budget-constrained individuals, who cannot be expected to keep flying out for a regularly-needed restorative workout. Not everyone lives next to breathtaking scenery or some character's haunt! The preventable carbon footprint as a result of the air travel is an issue too.

To skip over harness-less financial aerial yoga, the yoga network is bound to start out small and scale up as an enduring, substantial customer base grows and kinks in operations and expenditure are ironed out. Even so, the requisite startup capital is formidable. Nevertheless, compilation of the above list has been a fruitful exercise in counting blessings. Arts, in their myriad of colors and countenances, have already multiplied the universes we touch base with in our limited lifespans. We merely lose sight of many of them all too quickly.

Congratulations on making it to the end! But don't go away yet. Root for those settings that captured your heart in the poll and comment section below.

[soapver4]

Greek Lessons

Platform Bubble: Compulsory channeling of errant social media users (sans bots) to communication and civics coaching sessions tailored for online social networking issues as well as to personalized AI or human counseling, in lieu of outright bans or blanket content reach restrictions. To bring a soft touch that emphasizes the humanity of both errant users and people their actions affect or threaten to affect, the suite of rehabilitative measures is to be named after Nobel laureate Han Kang's short novel Greek Lessons, in which a man who has inadvertently hurt someone through his request for words bonds with a woman who has been hurt by words.

Representative participation in public discourse is vital for true democracy and rigorous social thought development, but the freedom of expression has frequently been abused as freedoms of misinformation, of incitement to hatred and of violence of all shades. On the flip side, there may be people who mean no harm but become or are seen as potential lightning rods for controversy due to differences in culture, generation, neurobiology or other background characteristics. We have seen fallout from the two issues manifest as US politicians' allegations of social media censorship and TikTok's previous suppression of disabled users' content, on the grounds of shielding them from bullying, respectively. Some neurodivergent netizens themselves have expressed frustration, self-doubt or anxiety over clashes with moderators as a result of biologically wired behavioral deviations. Yet their wealth of lived experience and creativity cannot be exactly replicated by their neurotypical advocates, whose more distant perspectives may cover neurodivergent blind spots but not offer complete views by themselves. Their voices are indispensable for fellow members of their biodemographic silos and for the world. Greek Lessons the platform initiative preserves access to a responsible freedom wielded with care and consideration.

Unassailable rebuttals of unfairness claims, along with second chances for people who genuinely harbor no malicious intentions, can be provisioned through a requirement for counseling processes to pinpoint specific problems in flagged content and work users through steps they can take to convey any otherwise harmless message in the content in a non-hostile, non-harassing manner that is factually accurate, does not reduce the usability of the platform (by, for example, flooding feeds with gibberish messages) and complies with any other necessary ethical guidelines. Laying out the detailed rationale for flagging the content as problematic is of utmost importance here since not everyone is up-to-date on social consciousness regarding online interactions (e.g. the line between engagement farming and reasonable self-promotion) or capable of seeing their content from the perspective of other platform users. In the event a counseling process is unable to pinpoint precise issues in a flagged item, the platform must clear the content creator's name with respect to that item and roll back punitive and safeguard actions taken against the creator accordingly.

Here's an example of how AI would edit the January 6th protest tweet leading up to deadly rioting: Original: "Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!" Rewritten: "Peaceful yet powerful protest in D.C. on Jan 6. Energetic voices, let's be heard!"

Here's AI rectifying tweets content creators may not realize are spammy: "The key is to remove the pushy, sales-like tone, while encouraging your audience to engage with the content. Focus on how the product or service can genuinely benefit others, invite them to explore it on their own, and avoid any pressure. Make the links feel like part of a helpful conversation. This makes the post less like a pestering promotional message and more like an open, authentic dialogue, even if you’re promoting something on behalf of your company." Original: "I’ve been using this incredible new app for weeks! Highly recommend! [link] #LifeChanger" Rewritten: "Our new app has been getting great feedback for helping with organization. If that's something you're interested in, here's the link: [link] #LifeChanger" Original: "I just got my hands on the latest tech! If you want one too, check it out here: [link] #TechAddict" Rewritten: "The latest tech is definitely making waves! If you're into gadgets, this new product might catch your interest. Check it out here: [link] #TechAddict"

So far, the system can be gamed. Willful social media users may ignore what they have been taught and repeat their mistakes, leaving rule enforcers to detect and put them through the processes all over again. This detection is not always easy, especially if such users embark on an arms race with the enforcers, each side coming up with more sophisticated techniques (keyword monitoring versus emoji speech and coded language, device fingerprinting versus fingerprint spoofing, IP tracking versus VPN, etc.) to pursue their goals on the platforms. Social media platforms, on their part, may delay or drag out counseling processes almost indefinitely on the basis of resource limitations. Or, their algorithms may subject even well-behaved users they nevertheless deem as divisive, high-maintenance, malefaction-inviting or otherwise troublesome to recurrent rounds of rehabilitative sessions which close intervals render the rollback mechanism above redundant.

To counter workarounds, social media platforms may be required to restrict the entire set of rehabilitative sessions for each user to a week at a time, and after the week the platforms must grant the user a 30-day period to post content screened by mentoring users. The length of this period should be adjusted as far as reasonable to match a scientifically ascertained window of time required for habit formation, so that lessons stick with errant users. The mentor pool, on the other hand, can be curated carefully in advance from users eager to offer their guidance in exchange for perks like free or discounted premium membership or badge privileges. It is theoretically possible to adopt AI-based screening tools in lieu of mentors, except that the AI algorithms may contain the same vulnerabilities and biases that lead to the aforementioned workarounds. Human mentors are therefore essential, and must be replaced if errant themselves. Appeal channels will remain lifelines.

What if resource concerns are real, the more business-minded among us are asking? Several mitigating strategies can be executed in parallel. For a start, Greek Lessons need only be mandatory on social media platforms which user bases exceed a certain size each. This size depends on profitability and mentor availability. Needless to say, users excluded from smaller platforms because of the lack of rehabilitative measures can turn to these platforms. Next, the flexibility to provision Greek Lessons in-house, outsource it to company-selected contractors or tap on a shared service can be granted to social media companies. Such a service shared by all utilizing platforms has autonomous management, operations and guidance staff and resources sustained through a common fund the platforms contribute to. Finally, if all the prior strategies prove inadequate, the components of Greek Lessons can be pared down as necessary for cost savings, with pre-recorded communication and civics coaching sessions as the bare minimum. If the inadequacy is more a result of political pushback from companies than of financial and mentoring constraints, whereas relevant oversight resources from governments or the industry nevertheless remain viable, the reform mechanism can be changed from an ideal, justice-based approach that exacts legal penalties from uncooperative companies to a pragmatic, incentives-based approach: a high-profile accreditation scheme that grades platforms according to the level of components they implement. Surrender to unbalanced industry lobbying power is never palatable, of course, yet it is a reality we have to plan for until we right that balance.

Are there alternative solutions to the struggles between digital harmony and digital inclusivity? The answer is affirmative. The motivation to place the burden of rehabilitation on social media companies, instead of governments or civil society, is not fiscal but ethical, however.

On one level, in a hectic age where time is more of a precious commodity than ever, the attention economy is a hypercompetitive marketplace. Social media algorithms and cultures are cannibalizing consumer attention to such a degree that thinkers and other movers and shakers have no option but to migrate to the platforms to reach sizable audiences beyond the increasingly small devoted readerships of print media and beyond limited turnouts in in-person conferences, both of which are additionally not as agile as spontaneous online posts. These platforms are as a result effectively new town squares for societal discourse, such that collective exclusion from the platforms — owing to convergent user management approaches and time lost by users in re-establishing followings on refugee platforms — amounts to near-total exclusion from time-sensitive participatory democracy. Companies that hog and profit off consumer attention thus have a duty to redress the externality that is sociopolitical process distortion.

On another level, rehabilitation at the first chance is an act of civic-mindedness. When successful, it especially prevents clueless or unthinking platform users from repeating errant behavior in other circles, whether online or offline. This in turn minimizes the reproduction of damage as well as of efforts required to remedy the same damage across social ecosystems. The alternative here is a game of whack-a-mole, which may come to a halt at some point but not before diverting the platforms' very own attention and expenditure, together with others', away from value-adding activities.

No reader is alone in thinking that even the complete suite of rehabilitation measures is no panacea for the ills of social media. Disputes will remain over issues like factuality, biases, definitions of spam and more, tension between candidness and sensitivity, policing usage hours, age limits, etc. Solutions beyond tackling errant users also need to be mined for problems like online effects on body dysmorphia. Indeed, the initiative can only be part of a larger toolkit at best. Nevertheless, it is a vital part.

Even though Han Kang's Greek Lessons is not the most riveting of her works, its poetic ruminations on how senses and differing sensibilities fashion a knife between a person and the world speak volumes. She likens her heroine's existence as an aphasia-suffering divorcee who lost custody of her child to "a shadow, riding on the cold hard surface of walls and bare ground, an outside observer of a life contained in an enormous water tank." What is more, the silence is a bitter, thin one "like that dark blank interstitial space between one meteor and another." However, that is one place her metaphor-heavy prose goes too far. The space is not blank, but haunted by fellow alienated souls, some innocent like the heroine and some with a taste for wanton violence. That they may be stuck together, enduring similar labels under monitoring systems, for prolonged periods is more than unfortunate. Let the initiative speed back the first group to our world and coax the second group, often unambitiously dismissed with a give-up attitude, to embrace a compassionate way of life.

Inline quotes are translations of Han Kang's text by Deborah Smith and Emily Yae Won.

[soapver4]

Paintbrush Demon

Spinoff Bubble: An old paintbrush demon's meditations on what it means to have the brush as your only tool in a demon-fighting career.

Ancient romance series Eternal Night Star River, which unmentionable official English title can be easily figured out by the uninitiated, has done a great job of calling out society's persecution and abuse of those we perceive as different from ourselves. Nevertheless, it could have gone further. The idea that demons, the Other in the story universe, are single-minded beings incapable of complex considerations is worth dissection, for one. Has this kind of facet of demon lore in general grown out of dominant real-life social groups' desire to assert superiority over those they fear and alienate? Is it a fair assessment of those alienated people? Already, global discourse has seen pushback from anti-discrimination advocates against all kinds of reductive narratives that deny the full humanity and intricate psychological depth of discriminated individuals, positive ethnic and disability stereotypes included. Regardless of their positions in power hierarchies, people want to be accepted not as labels or icons, but as whole human beings with a dynamic, wide range of thoughts, emotions, needs and experiences.

This range encompasses dreams beyond mere survival. As if it is not enough that discriminated people in our non-magical world often feel that they have to work twice as hard as ordinary counterparts to overcome prejudice in stable jobs, headlines on raising work competencies of disabled adults can be far more commonplace than headlines on recognizing work competencies of disabled adults, perpetuating generalizations about disabled skillsets. Against this backdrop, competing with ordinary counterparts for riskier careers may appear to be a no-no. Successful counterexamples in such careers are readily brushed off as resources-blessed outliers. Well-meaning people may also focus on shepherding marginalized individuals to a well-defined set of lower-skilled, uncreative vocational roles that do not always match personal interests — goods assembly and packing, F&B service, etc. — urging them to be grateful for having any work at all. There is enough fortune in living as soulless economic machines raising more soulless economic machines who will raise yet more soulless economic machines in time-exploitative late-stage capitalism. But chances are a fit with any statistical model is no more your privilege than outlierhood is. How well did Vincent van Gogh's "real jobs" go? The old paintbrush demon's predicament is one all around us.

Episode 1: Scenic Portraits

Regaled by his granddad's accounts of epic battles against mighty monsters, Mao Ye has always dreamt of subduing evil-doing demons. The inconvenient part is that he himself is a demon in a human-run world that sees all of his kind as malicious, and a helpless paintbrush demon at that. So he resorts to painting scenic portraits for tourists in his home province for a living, with a secret emphasis on the scenic part. He would station himself at locations of those battles and meticulously transfer the grandeur of the backdrops to his paper with the greatest aesthetic finesse, then with a discreet sigh slap on some plainer strokes to add the figures of tourists commissioning the portraits. We are treated to a comedic sequence of him cooking up all sorts of tricks and excuses to evade addition of those figures.

It comes as a shattering shock to our old protagonist when news reach him that one of the supposedly silly young couple he last drew a portrait for were [spoiler caution w.r.t. original series] the Godly World Guardian, who's simultaneously a half-demon of the highest demon rank and a demon catcher of the highest rank, and his fiancée, herself rumored to be a reincarnation of the previous Godly World Guardian and whose bubbly, womanly look belies her unique supreme ability, among humans, to slay demons barehanded. Together, they have just vanquished a demoness about to exterminate the world. What has he been doing with his thousand years of existence?

Episode 2: Hair-Raising

As in the original series, a catastrophe threatened to break out even after the obliteration of the demoness. Chaos that ensued resulted in the escape of numerous horrendous demons from demon-trapping pagodas and dungeons. Uncertainty in the air dampened consumer spending. By now, nobody cares for touristy mementos anymore. Simultaneously, though, demon catching academies sprout up all over the land in response to demand for demon catchers and rising aspirations among humans and demons alike to work as one, inspired no doubt by the feat of the [spoiler caution w.r.t. original series] half-demon who serves as a Godly World Guardian. Mao Ye swiftly enrolls in one such academy, never mind that principals and instructors in the academies barely conceal their disbelief that most demons can be dutiful demon catchers. To them, training demons in the craft is like handing the keys of bank vaults to thieves, but outright turning away demon applicants may invite public reprobation in the wake of widespread admiration of and sympathy for the half-demon's tumultuous life story.

Mao Ye's instructor, however, softens at the sight of his age. Believing that only true passion for justice could have motivated such a frail man to opt for grueling training in lieu of peaceful retirement, the instructor puts in the utmost effort to impart his skills to the paintbrush demon. Unlike innumerable insecure instructors, he does not reserve any knowledge to himself. Mao Ye, for his own part, puts up with pain and fatigue exacerbated by advanced age as he practices moves, pores over readings and compiles notes late into the night for months on end.

It's time for a real-world practice session. On the instructor's command, Mao Ye joins a squad of demon catchers for a week. They face off with a menacing wolf demon. The only other demon on the squad, a heart-melting little cherry demoness nobody takes seriously, emerges as the MVP, firing off with extreme precision in timing and target multiple task-appropriate talismans that let her take down the big bad wolf. Our paintbrush demon, on the other hand, emerges with a chunk of brush hair scraped off his brush head.

Mao Ye is troubled. He realizes that he selfishly loves battle scenes more than actual battles. Art is his primary love, dueling his secondary love. The tribulations of age mean that his brush head has been growing frayed to begin with. If the battles go on, he will no longer be able to draw. Taking on a new identity as a demon catcher would mean erasure of his cherished identity as an artist.

The instructor flies into a thunderous rage on hearing the squad's report of Mao Ye quitting. He calls the paintbrush demon a bad role model for youth, a failed, fickle team player, the reason the world still does not trust demons, the cause of his old miserable demon life, and a prime example of why we should not pity anyone too readily. Mao Ye does not take kindly to the insults, but in the end he concedes, "I'm an unlikable protagonist."

He returns to his hut, angrily churning out paintings after paintings of himself as a spineless monster, egoistic monster and deceitful monster.

Episode 3: Emo-Innards

"Gee, did you decide to quit your monkhood plan halfway into the shave, old man?"

"Get lost if you don't want any portrait."

"Portrait? I heard that what you really do are scenery paintings!"

"No. I do portraits."

The paintbrush demon shoves rolls of those angry paintings at the lad passing by his art booth.

"Buy one to have a good laugh at this monster every day so that you can feel better about yourself."

By and by, self-deprecation actually sells. These are bleak times, after all. Mao Ye, already famous for his art in the original series, becomes the talk of the town for essentially inventing comedic art decor therapy. Demoralized demon catchers really chuckle at his self-portraits before they restart sticky missions.The old and new artworks attract the attention of a businesswoman setting up a franchise of demon catching academies in an already saturated industry. She has long believed the market base for such academies can be broadened further still. Mao Ye's epic scenery art and emotion-stricken monster figures, along with feats like those of the half-demon and cherry demoness, set off a light bulb in her head. She approaches him to commission a long series of marketing materials picturing unlikely demon catchers in atmospheric battle scenes — housewives defending their infants like fierce beasts in a mountain war, a starstruck girl catching her demon catcher idol just before he falls off a windswept cliff, a mouse demon hovering above a clumsy cat demon, and more. The final reward will be his much-needed metal brush cap: a pricey full-face helmet resilient to all demonic attacks.

To the businesswoman's utter disappointment, Mao Ye executes his tasks half-heartedly the way he used to slap tourist figures onto his scenic paintings. But the proud woman hates two things: being wrong in judgment and giving up. She changes tack. Art is not her forte, but reading and influencing minds and hearts is. She orders him to draw portraits of her targeted clientele's pained, mischievous and willful inner monsters, a more relatable task to him. Mao Ye struggles to put himself in the clientele's shoes but does perform better at this task. She, however, is not satisfied, ordering him to study his subjects up-close in crowded markets away from distracting scenery for extended periods of time and redo every drawing until every tangled strand of emotion from the clientele's lives is palpable on the monsters. Next, she orders him to do the same for the people they protect and then for the demons they fend off. The step after that is to place combinations of the inner demons onto battle scenes. Only after that step is perfected too does she tell him to paint human and external demon coverings onto the characters, exhorting him to imagine how the coverings simultaneously exhibit and conceal those inner demons.

Mao Ye takes a step back and gasps at his final artworks. He has never expected a complete art noob to rectify his lifelong flaw. Again, what has he been doing with his thousand years of existence?

Episode 4: Demon Historian

An arsonist dragon demon dances around Mao Ye as he stumbles around in the heavy helmet crushing his ageing neck. When the paintbrush demon falls onto the grass, the dragon demon gleefully licks his helmet here and there with its breath of fire, turning his already blurred and obscured view into a sea of crimson. Mao Ye yelps in horror, momentarily forgetting that the fire will not damage the helmet. The dragon demon yawns and soars up and away, its orange scales glittering in the sunlight. It finds him too lame to kill or wound.

When Mao Ye relates the encounter to the businesswoman, she politely expresses her sympathy, before offering him more work in exchange for a pricier, lighter helmet with the same protective qualities. Well, his life experience does not really count for nothing. He detects a carefully concealed smirk from her. It is obvious that she has chosen the heavy helmet and now probably only a slightly improved version to keep him working for her. The paintbrush demon pushes instead for free enrollment in her best academy as partial remuneration, since his previous instructor has given up on him. When his skills are finally top-notch, he will be able to execute demon catching missions without damaging brush hair. The businesswoman, however, discloses that her better academies run entrance tests to sieve for ready students. She sweetly suggests, instead, that he starts at an academy at the lowest tier. What a fantastic money scheme. How many years will remain in his lifespan when he reaches a tier high enough?

While trudging home, the paintbrush demon has a despicable idea. He shall hand out a spare academy ad he has crafted to the dragon demon. Didn't she believe that everyone is a potential customer? The spectacular dragon flames will be free interior decor for the calculative businesswoman's premise. He guffaws but soon stops in his tracks. Where is the dragon lair?

At the hut, Mao Ye rummages through his stash of unsold scenery paintings and rejected scenic portraits. He pores over changes to landscapes in various locations over the millennium and tries to figure out how they may be linked to demon incidents he remember. After a week-long struggle, he finally starts to work out a means of identifying dragon lairs through the chronological changes.

With much trepidation, Mao Ye sneaks into the dragon demon's lair. But the dragon demon spots him in no time and advances menacingly. Mao Ye cannot escape fast enough. Desperate, the paintbrush demon recalls a leftover self-portrait from his sale of the day. He turns around and, shutting his eyes, flashes the portrait. The dragon demon pauses in surprise, before rolling its long, scaly body on the ground in wild laughter. Mao Ye quickly plants the ad next to it and slips away.

Back in his town, the paintbrush demon has a drink at an inn to settle his nerves. It happens that the businesswoman is there with her three toddlers too. As he watches the quartet blissfully tuck into their dinner from afar, pangs of guilt progressively hit him like a ton of bricks. Drinks have never tasted worse.

The next morning, Mao Ye wakes up to what he fears: news that the dragon demon is razing down the businesswoman's headquarters.

Episode 5: Standing in Somebody's Talons

Mao Ye rushes to the scene. The cherry demoness and various other demon catchers are already trying to subdue the dragon demon, which unfortunately metamorphoses into its last lifecycle stage, a demon of the second highest rank, before the horrified spectators' eyes. Desperate all over again, the paintbrush demon thinks back to the inn and frantically grabs a large piece of rice paper to paint on despite his great doubt. Spectators nearby watch his work in puzzlement, then in wonder. The paintbrush demon shakily shows the raging dragon demon the painting: a grand beautiful scene in alluring, amber tones of it and similar-looking dragon demons of smaller sizes blissfully tucking into a steamy dinner.

The dragon demon's tragic backstory is then played onscreen.

"Your life story left so deep an impression on me I could not forget the details despite my deteriorating memory. You don't really want to burn down anyone or anything. All you have yearned for is an apology for the witch hunt that destroyed your family. But my young dragon friend, dead people cannot apologize, and dying people cannot stand in your shoes, I mean, talons. They depart from this world believing they have been right all along. Look at art, on the other hand. Art — can submerge the most stubborn demon catchers in tears for the rest of their lives."

Mao Ye then confesses his role in luring the dragon demon here in front of the enormous crowd. He reflects on how the businesswoman does not truly deserve death for her non-murderous manipulativeness and how her innocent kids who inspired the painting do not deserve inevitable collateral harm, just like how the dragon demon's targets have not all endorsed the witch hunt. Make reparations together for the misdeeds of demons and demon catchers alike by informing and circulating such storied art, he earnestly proposes. And that way, the dragon demon's family will at least live on in fleshed-out narratives. The dragon demon's tears begin to flow out uncontrollably, eventually dousing the roaring flames.

After the incident, the businesswoman thanks Mao Ye for his intervention, yet terminates their collaboration with immediate effect. This time, he knows that he cannot blame her. Would he himself want to associate with a trusted person who once put his life and livelihood on the line? Still, he does one more thing for her, without compensation. To cope with her expanding franchise, the businesswoman has been dispatching letters to authorities, stores and renowned demon catchers for training grounds permits, magical weapons and instructor recruitment respectively. These in-demand parties, however, are practically buzzed all day long by numerous self-flying, audio-transmitting paper cranes conjured from such letters. So, Mao Ye paints exquisite art onto paper cranes, such that they would stand out, or maybe fly out, from the crowd.

As our paintbrush demon watches the painted paper cranes soar away, he thinks back to his triumphs and trials during these five episodes. He has another idea. So much for people's claims that you'll definitely turn stale and stubborn as you age.

Episode 6: Close Shave

With much festivity, Mao Ye launches an art-based demon catching support business with the following specialties:

Weapons: Emotive art (Funny portraits, empathetic portraits of loved ones, etc.)

Morale boosters: Perspective-changing art (Art similar to the demon catching academy ads)

Remediation and negotiation: Storied art

Reconnaissance: Copies of chronological records of landscape changes annotated with historical events

Networking: Visually arresting messenger paper cranes

As time goes by, the paintbrush demon picks up so many orders he has to search for helpers. Catching wind of this, some of the arson spectators amazed at his courage to own up to his mistakes and make reparations offer their paid services. Touched at the number of humans and demons who show up, Mao Ye publicly vows to deliver the best for their land through his business.

The business grows more and more successful. One day, however, a spurned blind spider demon from outside with extremely acute hearing storms through his business premise, stabbing all living and nonliving things in its way. Mao Ye looks in alarm as one after another of the helpers he has bonded with fall down in pools of blood. The giant spider demon speeds towards the youngest helper, a trembling, baby-faced 15-year-old. Mao Ye must make a decision, even though his helmet is not here.

Gritting his teeth, the paintbrush demon hurls himself at the spider demon. He valiantly reenacts moves drilled by his previous instructor. The spider demon slashes right at his hair. Mao Ye flinches yet holds his ground to fire off more moves. It is a relatively weak demon, so he should be able to ward it off in time. More and more of the hair falls to the floor. When at long last the spider demon collapses, conscious helpers stare aghast at Mao Ye's bald head.

Episode 7: Cherry-Picking

Some days Mao Ye pats himself for saving the boy. Some days he is too glad not to be a monster. Some days he drinks until he is deadwood over his evaporated art identity and career.

At the encouragement of a bright-eyed helper, now soon-to-be unemployed ex-helper, the bald paintbrush demon tries out painting in his human form, painting with his bare brush handle, and splatter painting. However, current results suggest it will take years for him to master any of them. His expertise in stroke techniques applied through his own brush hair was accumulated and refined over a millennium.

If only his helpers had his expertise, they would not need to disperse soon. That gives Mao Ye one last idea. While his art stocks dwindle, he begins converting the business to an art academy training humans and demons in his specialties.

And thus the premise becomes a wellspring of demon catching talent. Even the cherry demoness turns up for lessons. We learn that her demon catching skills deteriorated instead of climbing further under the tutelage of Mao Ye's previous instructor, a righteous man who unfortunately remains skeptical about demon merits. No matter how hard she worked at proving herself, the instructor saw on her only more and more evidence why she is a misfit for their line of work. The cherry demoness believes that art can be a great ancillary weapon in her demon catching career and that Mao Ye, as a fellow demon, will impart his skills with less bias.

Episode 8: A Bus

The cherry demoness' non-art-based combat skills turn out to be pretty solid, despite what her account might suggest. Yet that feedback does not diminish her curiosity to learn art-based combat. Her quick progress leaves everyone in the academy starry-eyed. Mao Ye grumbles to himself about having another art noob run over him but is amazed no less. The art academy students form a close-knit community, bouncing quirky ideas off each other and celebrating Mao Ye's birthdays in rambunctious style.

After one such birthday party, Mao Ye sits back on his rocking chair, contentedly gazing at all the artworks in his airy academy hall. He drifts into a deep sleep. The music turns ominous, and the screen goes black. When the light comes on again, however, we see that Mao Ye wakes up as a wistful senior care facility resident in the real world with no memories of his dream. The finale of Eternal Night Star River blares for the umpteenth time from the phone of a female relative of another resident. Amnesiac awakening experiences happen to many other demon artists in the academy as well, who turn out to be from various walks of life and age brackets. A couple of them cross swords in the passageway of a high-pressure office, never remembering they were comrades sharing a passion for art in the academy.

One academy student, the cherry demoness, has a habit of jotting down her dreams after waking up, however. She doodles warmth-suffused art academy scenes and grand battle scenes, featuring Mao Ye and her classmates, on a bus passing by the senior care facility and the office to the bakery she works at. What would it be like, she wonders, if one or more of them come up to her someday, telling her that they are real, that they shared the dream?

[soapver4]

Romance Mushrooms Statistics

Platform Bubble: Pile on the foam! A store of nerve-soothing appliances that turn never-ending housework into a fantasy game à la the healing, humbling psychofantasy drama Eternal Night Star River, which cheesy official English title captures neither the humanistic significance nor the poetic quality of the native title's allusion to a transmigrating soul lighting up a stream of bright spots in [spoiler caution] another wandering soul's life. By the way, let's spell it out for this really unobvious instance: Romance Mushrooms Statistics is the renegades headquarters' store's name.

The store concept hails from the series' denouement: All along you probably think that the percentage values shown by mushroom-like dust demons as part of the in-show conquest game foisted onto the corporate-rat-trapped-in-novel heroine are the percentages of her its snarky demon-catcher hero loves, when in reality they are the degrees to which he is willing to do all that is necessary for her. The final push [spoiler] completing the dizzying journey from -200% to 100% is his newfound self-love that gives him the confidence to take a literal plunge back to real life for her, giving up his world guardian identity and magical powers and waking up as a bespectacled convalescent so that he, the novel's author, can rewrite the desolate ending.

Each appliance features a progress bar which mushy but hopefully motivational readings ranging from "-200% In Love" to "100% In Love" speak to the mundane reality of spousal and familial love, to the heroism we need more immediately from romantic partners than other forms of heroism most of the time. Users can set a frequency at which they aspire to operate the appliance (e.g. clothes washing once a week, dishwashing every 24 hours) and a buffer time window (e.g. one hour from an expected dishwashing time of 9 pm). The readings drop from 100% to 0% as the time window closes, and rise from 0% to 100% as appliances complete their runs, operate continuously or discontinuously for some aggregate amount of time (in the case of appliances like stoves), or get filled up (in the case of appliances like vacuum cleaners). Readings drop below 0% when appliances are damaged or under-maintained. The bars and numbers are rendered of course in sparkly bubbles. Lean into the mush!

Appliances are also renamed as follows:

Stove → Tummy counselor-demon academy (Remember? Not all demons are bad.)

Oven → Crust aroma demon abode

Dishwasher → Grub illusion demon slayer

Clothes washer → Fabric demon bathhouse

Clothes dryer → Water demon reincarnator

Vacuum cleaner → Dust demon herder

Buttons of the appliances are styled as images of spiffy, neat gray talismans like those in the story. The thematic approach can be extended to button captions too by, for example, rewriting the Start button as Begin Spell. All designs must be tweaked or discarded, however, where they compromise legibility or safety. Red emergency stop buttons will not be touched by invisibility spells anytime soon.

The mystical feel can be enhanced further, while maintaining sleek, clean looks in general, by selectively decorating side panels, vacuum suction pipes and appliance outlines with subdued depictions of the iridescent, gassy energy streams [spoiler] our bumbling but ultimately brave heroine learns to wield in the game to protect the many people she loves. Translucent, glassy panels or stripes are adopted where possible in incorporating these depictions. It is a buoyant balance between emotional immersion and practical functionality, just as the screen protagonists, tragic side characters turned power couple in the game, lift up and fight alongside each other.

To up the motivation factor, songs from Eternal Night Star River (can't we just forget the other title?) and other ancient romantic fantasy series are played, under licensing deals, from each appliance as it is put to use. New songs can be downloaded over the years to keep experiences fresh.

If all that sounds too fluffy and mawkish to you, here's mathematics to the rescue. Users have the additional option of downloading regular podcasts about mathematical ideas in ecology onto the appliances. Sample episodes: J-shaped (exponential) growth versus S-shaped (logistic) growth in microbial "demon" populations depending on resource limitations, density-dependent egg production of giant intestinal roundworm "demons," count distribution (specifically, the nature of Poisson distribution) of bacterial "demons" in diluted cell cultures. You'll at least want them for your little future Charles Darwins as they help out with the chores.

One downside of these appliances is their higher energy consumption. We need those next-generation solar roof tiles. What we also need: soul transmigration into some tech billionaire's life story to speedily make the store a reality. That's a new-year resolution: Scout for a mossy stone panda.

[soapver4]

Vig Vang: Eve Variance Authority

Spinoff Bubble: Variance is the command, as first love never ages. Look here for the meta-origin story.

"The Janitor is here!"

Cries and screams surge like tsunamis across the sweeping landscape as mountain-size bulldozers close in overhead. The camera follows a sweating middle-aged man as he pushes through thick, rushing crowds on town squares, along streets and then up a winding stairway leading to a cliff. At the top, he huffs and puffs before a thirty-year-old in sloppily buttoned denim clothes seated in a tower crane which soars into the clouds.

"Sir, haven't we already complied with your order to bar females from sporting wavy, waist-length hair?"

"So you did, deputy mayor," the younger man sits with one leg crossed horizontally over another.

"Haven't we also ordered all women with limpid brown eyes to wear contact lenses that alter the color all year round?"

"What an undertaking, huh?"

"Are the names the issue then? But we have confirmed so many times that no Eve, Monroe or any other name evocative of legendary femininity remains on the population register any more!"

"Quit pandering to this mafia thug, you weakling!" A bald man with a round figure staggers up the cliff with the help of two younger staff members. "Why, just a fortnight ago, we even caved in to his ludicrous demand to rename evenings as oddings!"

The man in the towering crane rose and thundered, "And hence you felt entitled to headline your newsletter 'Mayor Committed to Evening Out Economic Recovery Through Improved Market Conditions'?"

A gigantic wrecking ball swings down like a massive asteroid at turbo speed, sweeping away the politicians, the staff, the cliff and long swathes of the sprawling megalopolis.

❄ ❅ ❄

We rewind to a time 14 years before the event. The Janitor was an emaciated teen trolled by his peers and despised by even his own family. The only person he felt human in the presence of was a kindly girl two years older than him who frequented the same hospital. She was its true medication for him. In her eyes, the world was one huge care home. Whenever he ranted about his encounters, she would calmly explain that everyone we brush shoulders with harbors invisible wounds which some instinctively project onto others through taunts and insults out of suppressed desperation and helplessness they aren't always conscious of. Why were none of the adults he met like her, he wondered? To him, this girl with limpid brown eyes and waist-length hair on the cusp of womanhood was Eve, the first real female to ever grace their land. Too embarrassed to reveal the exact depth of his admiration, he never got around to calling her by that name. Instead, he shyly proposed that they "arbitrarily" refer to him as Adam, instead of his real name, which always reminded him of the disparaging tone people addressed him in.

One afternoon, a disgruntled family member of a former patient went on an axe rampage from one ward to another. Adam rushed to hers despite the danger. To his horror, all the staff and parents themselves were bloodied and cowering. The well-built attacker raved about his loss of a teenage son to organ priority for females, then scanned the room with rabid eyes as everybody watched on with bated breath. Ultimately pulling up Eve, he called on all of them to feel the despair he felt as this fragile young beauty turns into a cold body before their eyes. They hurriedly put in a plea for her, arguing that her own parents were not there to witness her death in any case. But the attacker could not be convinced, since the pain would be so great phone recordings would suffice. He mocked what he saw as feel-good hypocrisy, pointedly asking whether any of these bystanders would jump the queue so that their children could take her place. Silence descended upon the ward.

Snorting with bitter laughter, the attacker proceeded to swing his axe at Eve. As we now know, it was Adam, in spite of his thin frame, who grasped the weapon. His pale hand streaking with crimson blood, Adam confessed his love and pleaded that if the attacker's son were alive and a tender-hearted person, his feelings for such a gentle girl would also bring him to risk his short life for her. More than proud physicians, purpose is what keeps us wanting to wake up tomorrow. Moved, the attacker cast away his axe dripping with blood at long last. Large tears brimmed in Eve's eyes as she wrapped her arms tightly around Adam, finally accepting love from a younger boy.

We know, too, that the good times that followed did not last. A violent earthquake flattened the hospital and numerous other buildings half a year later. When Adam regained consciousness, Eve's lifeless body was covering him, pierced in the torso by a fallen, broken beam glowing with embers. Desperately shaking her, he howled like a forsaken beast cub in the middle of the stretching ruins for a whole day. Later, he roamed their apocalyptic homeland aimlessly, all spots of glimmer extinguished from his young eyes. That was when he eventually stumbled into a band of inter-universe explorers studying the ruins. They revealed to him that the earthquake was caused by destructive interference that happened between little-known waves from his universe and from a twin universe when the two wandered too close to each other. A fire lit up in him as he resolved to dissect the cosmic physics that murdered Eve.

Life on the band expanded Adam's horizons but also deflated him further. Eve was everywhere but nowhere. In all the universes he visited, there was either no occurrence of the rare accident that led to Eve's birth in the first place or no version of Eve like the understanding, compassionate hospital Eve he missed with all his vulnerable beastial heart. There were, in aggregate, numerous females with her name or styling, on the other hand. Their mannerisms  — arrogant, childish, selfish and many more  — besmirched her. Fury consumed him. In the long years to come, Adam spent every minute of his life gathering and building on super-megastructural and other technologies from various universes to run an inter-universe authority rooting out all abuse of his lover's name and image. Eve is a singular philosophy no one can disturb or replace.

❄ ❅ ❄

After the Janitor leaves the bald mayor's universe in shambles, one of his mopmen rushes up to him with the news that the shadowy, newfangled Anti-Variance Authority has launched a multiversal war against theirs. The Janitor smirks. Rights need to be earned, not least the rights to old freedoms. What do those upstarts who have never experienced a one-in-a-trillion-universes enduring love like his know about anti-variance? From one universe to another, he meets their attacks head-on with his contingent. All this while, a dude in a shark suit lurks at the rear end of the opposing army. His aquamarine goggles and spiky, ash gray hair resemble the characteristics of a fringe tribe rumored to extract and sell organs to organ owners' variants across universes.

The enemy is small and less experienced, but sly, nimble and dedicated to fighting the Eve Variance Authority. Increasingly irritated at the distraction from his mission, the Janitor dispatches a reconnaissance unit to sniff out their home base. On receiving its location — a narrow, sinusoidal pocket of space nested among various universes and artificially filled with air — he and his mopmen charge forth with a surprise massive attack. It turns out to be a trap. Militia of the Anti-Variance Authority surround the pocket space.

But the Janitor will not go down so easily. He and his mopmen put up a violent resistance. In the midst of the chaos, he spies from the corner of an eye the dude in a shark suit running towards him at full speed with a harpoon. This is the opportunity he has been waiting for. He swerves towards the dude, and the two engage in a fierce combat.

Lightning bolts shoot out from the harpoon, to the Janitor's surprise. The blinding flashes start to overwhelm him. In his angry desperation, he seizes upon an opening to rip off the dude's goggles. What shine behind them are a familiar pair of brown eyes resembling but not quite those he has been unable to forget. He looks at the face closely. It's a woman.

She swipes at his face with her harpoon with great force and snarls, "Who are you to stare into my pupils? You who don't deserve to share his name? You who appropriated the name of his biblical wife as the name of your evildoing gang? You who've never experienced love as deep as bottomless ocean? Only one Adam in the entire universe of universes, the one short-lived Adam who loved a pale, hopeless, forever diseased girl more than he loved himself has the right to behold these eyes he had deep affection for!"

"E-Eve?" He gasps without thinking.

She merely gives him a cold, quizzical look.

❄ ❅ ❄

Quick flashbacks bring us back to the earthquake.

A cosmic glitch during the destructive interference had swapped the places of the versions of various people in the twin universes. Adam and Eve had both survived in their original universe and both perished in the other universe. The glitch, however, transported Adam to the universe where Eve laid dead, before he woke up, and vice versa. Wandering aimlessly like Adam, Eve caught sight of the fringe tribe while they were harvesting organs from the dead bodies everywhere. Her beauty caught the fancy of their leader, who brought her back to their real home base and found a matching organ that then cured her illness. Vision sharpened with the recovery made her intelligent eyes lovelier to the salivating leader. On their wedding night, she stabbed him fatally with trembling hands to escape his claws.

Clutching the edge of the bed, Eve cried for a long time at the beast she had become. When the tears dried, though, she dumped the leader's body in front of his followers, emotionlessly beckoning them to take revenge on her. But, instead, they fell to their knees and proclaimed her as their new inter-universe god, because according to their folklore, one leader legitimately succeeds another when he or she manages to wound that other leader at a certain location on the body.

Gradually, she reformed the tribe so that they stood for that love as profound as an ocean, making sure that they only facilitated organ transfers from dead people. Determined, too, that no other man should ever lay his eyes on her feminine form, she radically changed her styling. No longer often bed-bound and lethargic, she was not in the mood to sport long hair, which was cumbersome and time-consuming to groom, anyway.

The money factor and interpersonal politics around organ transfers resulted in various underhanded dealings, deceit and exploitation nonetheless. It was the day the attacker stormed her ward all over again. So many grownups were around her, but none had teenage Adam's moral courage or empathy. The pervasive violence, hypocrisy and calculativeness made her miss his innocence and idealism even more. Those days they spent together was the Garden of Eden in hindsight. Except that she wanted to tell her younger, naive self that people deserve their festering inner wounds. Would younger her shake her head of soft, wavy hair and smile sadly at present her?

The universes were almost innumerable and boundless, so nobody in the tribe learnt about the Eve Variance Authority for many years. When news of it finally reached Eve, she gathered information about its leadership, military power and operations. Adam? Of all names for the head of a draconian organization? She had more than enough of unworthy men who went by that name. It was time to take action, and his demise, welcomed by all universes he touched, shall be a fiery start. Taking inspiration from the organization, she established AVA, the misunderstood acronym which stood for Adam Variance Authority.

❄ ❅ ❄

As sparks and blood splatter about, the Janitor and Eve stare into each other's well-worn, hatred-twisted face with unspeakably pained expressions.

Haunting echoes resound through the sinusoidal pocket space.

[soapver4]

World War A: Anti-Gambit

Platform Bubble: A global chess league rating players by victories and defeats weighted according to not only the relative lifetime standings of their opponents, as is the current practice of the International Chess Federation, but also the number of personal and enemy pieces they preserve. The undertaking can set our bloodthirsty, injustice-ridden world thinking about alternatives to violence in defense campaigns, independent of the justifiability of any campaign. Squeeze out both pseudologic and logic oxygens keeping alive political murder machines. That is the true combat we need on a planet already overheated yet increasingly bent on engulfing itself in gunfire.

Logic disciplines and hobbies are what some of us turn to for refuge on a planet that so often refuses to reason, or at best selectively engages in self-serving reasoning, yet we cannot ignore how glorious and dark meanings alike color actions and destinations on the board. But first, this league proposal does beg the question of whether piece capture is a metaphor for killings in chess. Relax, some would say. The pieces merely enter chess jail and are liberated at the start of the next game. That interpretation, unfortunately, is far from universal, as a simple web search would illustrate. Moreover, life as a real prisoner-of-war is far from paradise. Although there are chess variants such as crazyhouse that reincarnate captured pieces into one camp or another mid-game, resurrection and loyalties switched at will are certainly not features of the real-life battlefield dynamics that chess lovers and observers see value in encapsulating and contemplating through the game. To combat problematic allusions, we can alternatively simply advocate for the designation of an off-board zone prominently labeled "Lounge" in all chess games and refashion the games as a kind of clown carnival but, on top of the loss of sobering armed conflict metaphors, the notion of linguistic and image tweaks may not be as arresting to chess movers and shakers as a heightened strategic challenge. The formidable task of keeping on the board as many pieces as possible, in contrast, brims with opportunities for the cerebral stimulation and growth players relish. Coincidentally, a growth conquest is the ideological opposite we can hold up to warmongers busy cutting lives short.

Embedding a social mission compensates for the excesses of chess to at least some extent. Chess is an exercise in deviousness. Many breakthroughs in the matches involve loopholes or rule-bending through the clash of game norms and restrictions. For instance, the prohibition of king capture (as opposed to mere threat on the king in e.g. checkmate) means that a pawn can be moved next to the enemy queen yet not be captured by her, if the move opens up a line of attack from another piece to the enemy king. After the opponent wastes their turn defending the king, the pawn can even capture that frozen queen. Also, since players cannot skip turns, opponents can deliberately narrow down their space for maneuver such that their only available moves are marching one or more pieces to doom. Quitting is a way out of this scenario termed zugzwang but we may not want to raise that white flag if there is still some chance for victory.

Green lines indicate current or future moves or threats. It's White's turn to move. The d4 pawn will freeze the mighty black queen by unveiling the bishop's threat to a piece less capable yet more crucial than her, the king. A sad old story. Claim the throne, woman!

It's also White's turn to move. By staying where he is, its king can prevent the b2 pawn's queen promotion, but all its pawns are stuck and its rook is obliged by the rules to stay in position to block the black bishop's attack on the king. Capturing the pawn is impossible as the black rook is backing it. Since no side is allowed to skip turns, he has no choice but to move away, witness the glorious promotion helplessly and scamper futilely for his life. Mate in three moves.

Certainly, high-stakes situations in life merit the study of wiles, both to employ and to defend against them. On the other hand, compartmentalization of one domain from another is not always guaranteed. Many of us may know of people who develop occupational tendencies that spill over to their lives outside work, like military superiors who raise their children on highly strict regimens. In a similar vein, habits of manipulation and exploitation may seep into aspects of life which do not warrant them. Even if players aver the lack of any such effect on the part of themselves or their peers, it is difficult to speak for all. And "all" is of essence here, since a handful of rogue individuals is more than enough to wreak havoc in our social groups and networks. In the absence of a robust study of a large, diverse population of chess players, caution is therefore necessary. Practicing humane care and compassion on chessboards counteracts any slippage into moral wantonness.

As a bonus, the tempering of chess' association with ruthless self-interest, a link intentionally or unintentionally corroborated by relevant book titles using adjectives like "cunning", "devious" and "underhanded" for a touch of playfulness or for celebration of those traits, can attract more people concerned with moral values to the discipline, spreading cognitive skills and virtues the game instills even in its classical format  — circumspection, planning ahead, delayed gratification, flexibility, creativity — more widely around the globe. When we can be confident in the values upheld by a field of endeavor, we can more readily appreciate the idea of throwing around those descriptors for jest or intellectual acknowledgment, somewhat like how Gen Z tosses around the word "brat" in unconventional contexts self-assuredly as they elevate its meaning to that of self-confidence, individuality and fun-seeking.

Other potential moral pitfalls of chess include the abusive and toxic subcultures alleged on forums like Reddit and in journalistic coverage. None of the pitfalls mentioned in this article is exclusive to or necessarily most heightened in chess. Nonetheless, if we have the chance to make the world a more tolerable place through one arena of life, we should seize upon that chance, just as many an attacked king would not want to miss a loose thread in a mating net.

Be under no illusion that identical numbers of captured pieces would equalize victories and defeats by players of the same rank in the chess league design. Here is a possible implementation, to be tweaked according to practicality, deontological considerations and other circumstances, of the league:

Add to a player's post-match rating under an existing mechanism a supplementary score y, which has a minimum value (e.g. -5) and a maximum value (e.g. 5). The maximum value is awarded to a victor who has neither captured any enemy piece nor lost any of his own pieces, for example in Fool's Mate. The worst case scenario, on the flip side, leaves two non-defeated pieces on the board, in either a stalemate between two unaccompanied kings or a checkmate by an enemy king and the enemy king's sole remaining piece. Assigning a worth of 5 points to each of the 32 pieces on the board, we can envisage y as m[(∑a - b)/c - d], where m is a multiplier which magnitude depends on how large we want the anti-gambit effect to be, a∈[0,5] reflects the state of each piece, b and c are constants identified further below to be used for normalization, and d is some reasonable score of the normalized sum of piece states, (∑a - b)/c, below which we want to penalize players for piece captures. Since an army owes a higher obligation to its own members than to enemy pieces, a=0 is scored for each member it loses during the game whereas a=1 is scored for each enemy piece it captures. Similarly, a=5 is scored for each member it protects till the end whereas a=4 is scored for each enemy piece it spares or king it checkmates. On the other hand, since the fate (e.g. slaughter, torture) of those lost members tends to be even worse in real-life scenarios than the fate of survivors on a lost land, a=2 is scored for each of a loser's surviving pieces.

Thus a loser checkmated by an enemy king and that sole remaining piece gets ∑a = 1 x 2 + 15 x 0 + 2 x 4 + 14 x 1 = 24. The player checkmating that lone king gets ∑a = 2 x 5 + 14 x 0 + 1 x 4 + 15 x 1 = 29. In that stalemate between two kings, each player gets ∑a = 1 x 5 + 15 x 0 + 1 x 4 + 15 x 1 = 24. The maximum ∑a is naturally 16 x 5 + 16 x 4 = 144. Now that we have seen that 24 is the worst possible sum of a and 144 the best possible, we can set b as 24 and c as 144 - 24 = 120. Check: If the multiplier m is 1 and d =0, the maximum value of y is therefore (144-24)/120 = 1, and the minimum is (24-24)/120 = 0. So far, y = m[(∑a - 24)/120 - d]. Suppose a wide-ranging scrutiny of games played under such a scoring scheme suggests that m(∑a - 24)/120 = 0.5m is a score above which most players targeting any value significantly struggle to make progress in matches, potentially resulting in a blanket of non-conclusive and predominantly defensive gameplay that threatens fan support for the league, we can set d = 0.5, such that y is a positive supplementary score when (∑a - 24)/120 is above 0.5 and negative when (∑a - 24)/120 is below it. If we then believe an addition and deduction of five rating points for maximal piece preservation and maximal piece sacrifice respectively is justified, m = 10 can be chosen. In that case, y = 10[(∑a - 24)/120 - 0.5] where 0 ≤ a ≤ 5 for each piece.

Fool's Mate preserving all pieces on both sides. Multiple defenses against this type of speedy checkmate are possible, however.

For a real-life illustration, let us apply the formula for y to a viral checkmate, proclaimed as a Mona Lisa Checkmate by the victor, that has been making the rounds on the Internet for its Herculean combination of beauty and cruelty: KNVB (2814) v The_Machine04 (2782). By move 45, Black (The_Machine04) had lost all its non-pawn and non-king pieces, whereas White (KNVB) was up by a knight and had critical control of the center of the board. But rejecting the facile victory already in sight, White spent over a hundred moves from there on squeezing Black around as White vanquished all remaining enemy pawns and promoted its own six remaining pawns, not into an overabundance of queens, but into pieces that made up the typical starting line of each game. Carefully avoiding a stalemate, White held Black at bay as it guided the promoted pieces into that starting formation. Along the way, the moves also forced the poor Black king to drift all the way to the second rank of the board, where the last piece to snap into the formation conveniently checkmated it. In a video commentary, Black acknowledged that he realized what was transpiring by the point of the first promotion (move 81) but refused to resign.

In the proposed global league, adopting the values of m = 10 and d = 0.5,

Black gets y = 10 x [(1 x 2 + 15 x 0 + 8 x 4 + 8 x 1 - 24)/120 - 0.5] = 10 x [(42 - 24)/120 - 0.5] = -3.5. His adjusted rating after that particular match is 2782 - 3.5 = 2778.5 ≈ 2779.

White gets y = 10 x [(8 x 5 + 8 x 0 + 1 x 4 + 15 x 1 - 24)/120 - 0.5] = 10 x [(59 - 24)/120 - 0.5] = -2.08. His adjusted rating after that particular match is 2814 - 2.08 = 2811.92 ≈ 2812.

Is the system's suppression of more displays of strategical artistry like the Mona Lisa Checkmate and of visual statements of unrelenting doggedness like The_Machine04's as it punishes both sides for unnecessary carnage lamentable? That is at least a case for the piece lounge alternative idea above. The two concepts can be executed in parallel.

Holding on to everyone of every rank and every circumstance is cumbersome and risky in numerous multi-stakeholder quagmires. In the face of an imminent physical attack, one may have no time to conduct sophisticated calculations to ensure airtight collective welfare that leaves out no one. Frequently, the alternative to active sacrifice of some is passive sacrifice of all. Yet that is all the more reason why we need to put our brains to such exercise and commence such intellectual exploration in the low-stakes sandbox environment chess as a discipline offers. The more we strategize balancing acts, the more solutions may occur to us, at higher velocities.

Until the escape velocity is reached, how many warzone newborns are those of us who are chess aficionados helplessly allowing to die, even before they learn to speak, as our little toy queens skate across little boards?

[soapver4]

Vig Vang: Chess Variance Authority

Spinoff Bubble: All cosmos are really culture broths, each flask of which contains one set of parallel universes, and an eccentric scientist peering at a slimy droplet of one through a powerful transmission ghoston microscope (guilty for the genesis of paranormal genres!) spies the Time Variance Authority and excitedly tinkers with the underlying organismal code to spawn mutated copies establishing variants of the variance authority. Witness this sample episode, "Chess Variance Authority."

Chess Variance Authority lumbermen walk into a bar which sole bartender is collecting ballots from patrons for the title of Sexiest Chess Piece. The smartly uniformed and armed lumbermen demand a ballot form from the bartender. Tilting his glasses, he looks them up and down and silently pushes a piece of paper to them. They glance at its candidate names and probe him warily, "How about the duck or anti-king? They aren't on the list?"

The bartender taps at the drinks menu and at the bold line "Order at least 5 pints to vote" on the form with a stoic expression. They frown. Lumbermen don't earn that much. They dig up their manual to check out expenditure claiming options. Just then, someone in a crowd slams down a humongous pitcher of glistening mead and yelps, "Bongcloud!"

Bing Bong?! Using the part-elephant plushie as a code word for the elephant piece variant won't fool them. The lumbermen spin around and charge forward with their garbage-picking sticks, but no elephant is seen on any chessboard. Another bar-goer taps their shoulders. They spin back to see Hikaru Nakamura gregariously grinning at them. No time for likes, subscriptions or sharing, sir. They return to their hunt. He pokes at them, again and again. They shrug him off. No time for Titled Tuesdays either. Every day's a Monday when you patrol vast universes on an understaffed team for your flimsy payslip. But then it slowly occurs to one of them: Why is a big, maybe busy star like him messing with them, yet not saying a word? It's a funny chess piece variant in disguise!

They spin back yet again. "Hikaru Nakamura" has long hobbled far into the distance. No fear. Their solarpad is still well-charged. A zigzagging sequence of hyper-energized runs across the park outside ensues. In time, they catch up to him. He pouts but soon gives them a thumbs-up and zips off his human flesh costume in sunlight-bathed slow-mo. The camera gives a fitting close-up — he, nay, she's a gleaming queen carved out of perfect marble. The lumbermen frantically try to recall protocol for greeting royalty. They bob a curtsy (the men halt halfway and wonder), bend down on one knee each and bow their heads, nearly hitting the ground. The queen sweetly smiles at them in magnanimous approval and waves them on as they return to their patrol.

After they have crossed the street, the lumbermen ponder among themselves, "Isn't a sweet queen piece also a chess piece variant?"

They give each other a hard look and hurry back. The waving queen freezes, attempts to lift her stiff marble dress off the ground, and scurries away. After some more madcap dashes, the lumbermen block her path. The queen gives a bittersweet smile. She drops down to the grass, where she promptly unrolls herself into a chessboard made of black-and-white marble paper.

The lumbermen scratch their helmets. Nabbing chessboards is not part of their jobs.

"Make sure to draft that bill outlawing paper chessboards," a chess keeper banging down their report later tells a fellow chess keeper.

Series idea inspired by @tumbler-polls and @xsommeee.

[soapver4]

Soul Nymph Engines

Platform Bubble: A micro-journaling app, coupled to a network of digital billboards displaying selected journal records, in which users post in the form of a female artist's elegant, fairy-like butterflies uplifting acts they have performed for or received from specific individuals.

Compassion is small, winged creatures — butterflies or otherwise — that angelic souls passing by leave in one's soul cradling and mending one's heart as treacherous, hideous cracks start to run over it one day.

That sentiment has evolved from a stream of thoughts on tragic lyrics played in Till The End Of The Moon: "Compassion is cradling a butterfly while broken and dying. (惻隱是碎殞時懷抱一隻蝴蝶)" The idea that there is so much scope for kindness even at the time of the moral agent's crushing death is exceptionally powerful. Couple that with the potential mental picture of a butterfly, said to be the representation and manifestation of the hero's deceased mother, being the preceding giver of kindness. Who and what else can be at even earlier points of a chain of altruism? Bring on the arthropod effect and the tornadoes. No being is too lightweight, weak or vulnerable to elevate life.

When users log on to the app or return to it after hours or more of inactivity, heavy rose-gold doors (or doors of another color selected by them) slide open to reveal a low-angle view of a boiler room, complete with the steam generator, which naturally stands for their own internal combustion. On reflection of the day, users shall type out descriptions of the uplifting acts they have performed or received. Since supporting people in the abstract does not always translate to supporting actual people, app instructions encourage users to state (without naming in the case of shareable entries) the precise beneficiaries of acts they performed. Clicking "Post" for a description will transform that text into one of the 25 delicate, ethereal butterflies in a painting scroll, 花蝶圖, attributed to ancient Asian female artist Ma Quan. Busy, rotating gears on the ceiling of the boiler room subsequently move apart to unveil a pastel-colored sky, into which a butterfly enclosing an uplifting act performed by the user soars and from which a butterfly enclosing an uplifting act received by the user enters into the boiler room.

Butterflies that have arrived drift around the boiler room forever, ready to offer users doses of positivity on rainy days, which is notably not a credible value proposition of currently popular social media platforms. Users can retrieve an enclosed journal record by clicking on a member of the swarm. Butterflies that reach certain numerical limits will be largely clustered as spots of lights of sizes that represent the numbers, with a few of the creatures remaining discrete to retain the enchanting visual effect. Similar to some interactive dot density maps, clicking on a large spot will magnify and split it into smaller, clickable spots. Click elsewhere to revert back to a single large spot. Butterflies that have taken flight are represented as a similar hierarchy of record-enclosing light spots, sans butterfly visuals, in the sky, which can be viewed by pulling a lever to open the ceiling again and scrolling upwards.

Pollen gusts and glows ripple through a user's handle on user lists, in group pages mentioned below for example, when the user is drafting or reviewing journal entries. In such a way, the micro-journaling and journal browsing give one a sense of connection to fellow users even when journal entries do not make it to billboards.

The digital billboards are updated multiple times a day, as close to real time as possible with serene but captivating flight animations, serving not only as publicity for the app and as journaling motivation but also as crucial reminders that altruism is not extinct even in bleak times. The shared journal entries can shape social norms and set some passersby thinking about how they can make someone's life better or whether they have overlooked the good in their lives in their attentional bias towards the bad. Users who consent to automatic consideration of their content for billboard display can check out in-app AI sentiment evaluation of their shareable entries by adjusting setting options. Filters bar journal entries with overall negative sentiment, perhaps pranks or hate speech sneaked in, from billboards. Nevertheless, passive-aggressive and sarcastic content may be challenging to detect. In the interest of user protection and AI fine-tuning, utopian feedback channels are available. The difficulty of securing a sustained dialogue with human staff members on various Western social media platforms, hopefully except the one you are reading this on, in our present Internet reality sets a low bar for that utopia.

Advertisers and investors need to brace themselves, however. To ameliorate cynicism in relation to sycophancy and other personal profiteering behavior, all individual users' journal entries away from billboards are visible only to themselves and eligible for billboard display only in anonymized formats and only in states and countries of their choices outside their frequently visited geographic regions. For the sake of privacy, users are permitted to opt out of selection for display and any name (e.g. of beneficiary or benefactor) mentioned in entries slated for display is screened away in advance.

Here are some connection opportunities and financial cheer all the same. Users are free to organize themselves into groups, such as alumni clubs, interest groups, charities and companies, on the app. Only human imagination further limits this space for Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) campaigns and other publicity efforts, billable by the app depending on factors such as activity scale and group type. Journal entries posted by or tagging any group are publicly visible on all relevant group pages, subject to abuse detection filters and group-administered moderation options. Notably, too, there is strength in numbers, so groups are better primed to tackle harassment and exploitation problems than individuals. Discussion boards are available for group members to brainstorm philanthropy or other outreach initiatives that can feed new posts (or to just exchange virtual brews). Public visibility of such posts is not merely a financially motivated compromise. With hope, each group post shall be one small step for a light organism born from paper, one giant leap for civil discourse, interfaith understanding, peaceful negotiation and finding ground for mutual respect despite deep-rooted differences.

Notice that financial balance is not the only staggering challenge that stems from the idealism of this technology setup. Moral accounting is another pitfall in this positivity app. Psychologists have observed a phenomenon known as moral credentialing, whereby people gain more confidence to engage in immoral behavior after performing good deeds that tell themselves they are virtuous people. Before those familiar congratulatory messages marking numerical milestones on the app are dispatched to users, they must be added with Google's former motto, "Don't be evil." Neither refraining from bad behavior nor doing the right thing is sufficient on its own.

May feminist care ethos have a prominent place.

May art be timeless.

[soapver4]

Sentient Jams

Metadrama Bubble: Fairies and demons ranting against fates repeated across lifetimes, generations and realms — plunging down abysses, unsealing of devils, naive and cutesy females transformed from mighty goddesses, coughing up blood, amnesia, tribulation cycles in the human world — realize through extreme heatwaves inducing near-death out-of-body experiences that they are goos processed and pumped through a circuitous pipe network. At the ends of the network, mixtures of them are packaged off as jars of jam that boost the hit points (HP) of consumers slogging away in a frenetic economy. On gulping down the jams, workers experience the entire fantasy dramas in a matter of seconds, but as though they have watched them for all 40 hours or so of running time, maximizing purchases at minimal cost to labor availability. The tropes are flavoring and texturing techniques replicated from monumental product successes, because the jam factory managers cannot risk their own jobs.

To escape the network and seize destiny for themselves, the goos must melt holes through the metal pipes using their mental strength. What better way to generate the brain heat than to crack riddles from some discipline with a (not always justly) fearsome reputation? In line with the themes of path restrictions and substance malleability, the discipline chosen is mathematical topology. The fairies and demons roam through cloud mountains and smoky seas for spiritual force experts and other helpers to attain the requisite mental power to work out solutions, while real-life viewers solve the topology riddles on the streaming/television network's website on behalf of characters they select.

Riddles of varying levels are available to cater to viewers with differing logic abilities and mathematical proficiency. The higher the level, the more points awarded for solving a riddle. To minimize mindless plagiarism, there must be a vast database of riddles which have not been previously published somewhere else, so mathematicians cannot ignore this promised pop culture sensation! Viewers cannot submit any solution for a riddle already solved by anyone, but they are free to rope in the assistance of people strong in topology since it is difficult to verify personal effort and that assistance may foster extracurricular peer sharing of mathematical perspectives, otherwise deemed too uncool a topic in everyday life, anyway.

Example of an elementary topology puzzle: Pair up infinitely stretchable and compressible objects of the following shapes by considering possible morphological transformations: tofu block, donut, mug and fusilli. Do not ignore any resulting gap or fissure within them. (Answer = tofu block and fusilli, donut and mug.)

Characters escape the pipe network across multiple episodes in the order of their respective fans' points so far. Escaped characters' spirits (representing their voices and heat) hoover around, unseen by remaining characters, in free-flowing hair and groovy solid-color costumes with flamboyant ruffles to rally behind their friends or channel mysterious supportive forces that either break down physical obstacles in the realms or guide the friends towards more helpers. Each episode closes with energetic dance collabs by all escaped characters, in their spiritual forms and then in their bouncy goo forms on the factory floor.

↑Pachinko's demos of characters breaching spatiotemporal barriers for dance meetups. Which is the better cheerleading BGM for viewers working on picture-hanging puzzles, if you don't let the second title daunt you: "Let's Live for Today" or "Wait a Million Years"?

The dancing cannot last forever, however, as factory staff will be back anytime soon. In the final shot, the goos finish their biggest dance collab and gather in front of the factory's colossal metal door.

Check out the alt text of the header image, which features another anti-trope metadrama.

[soapver4]

Anxiety Storm Pageant

Element Retooling + Expansion Bubble: Characters get to transform into vivid personifications of their inner anxiety storms, like the storm in Inside Out 2, in a televised pageant titled Pretty Anxious in a drama universe where such transformations are always possible but usually suppressed. However, there's more than meets the eye of the surrounding fanfare storm.

To be sure, the enthusiastic public embrace of blazing orange tornado flamencos, shimmering electric blue tsunami pop-punk ballads and dizzying violet pom-pom breakdancing did not emerge overnight. For what felt like an eternity, movements to elevate related social consciousness were met with a spectrum of unhelpful responses: open mockery, contempt at the neediness of assumedly self-negligent individuals, frowns at encouraging emotional softness, quiet discomfort, cold indifference, polite distancing, tokenistic sympathy. It took an extraordinary confluence of neck-breaking living pressures, celebrity trends, social media hype and unprecedented psychacademic stardom for people to come out of their closets and find solace and good-natured humor in bonding over the quirkiness and rich beats of their shared emotional mess.

Even so, characters soon find out that some anxieties are more equal than others, to paraphrase George Orwell. For starters, faraway storms of any kind can be admired and romanticized in safety, whereas nearby storms are best avoided, in many people's unspoken opinion. Television stars are to move hearts and minds but, for one, co-workers are to move along only deliverables with unfailingly warm robotic efficiency even in 24/7 work cultures that stretch capacity for compartmentalization to its limits. And how about the numerous other mundane contexts in which vibrant storms brew? They are essentially one and the same in the end. Wonders on the screen burn up once they exit the rarefied atmospheres of Tinseltown's soap factories, scattering down to litter-strewn common streets as weird detritus under hawkish gazes.

Many people do soften, however, when colored, shifting glows of anxiety storms gradually, helplessly light up from within their family members or close friends. Parents, in fact, are the most fervent talent scouts for the pageant, anxious to see the participation lift their children's moods, self-esteem and dignity in the community. They yell out deafening cheers from the spectator seats, to the annoyance of some close by, and lead contingents of fans, often arts lovers or like-minded younger people who admire the contestants' charismatic courage, in waving flamboyant banners. Experiences with their children's anxiety struggles also sometimes warm them to other young folks undergoing such struggles. Thus, we see some contestants' families strike up heartening friendships with each other. Unfortunately, the heat and intense flashes from non-blood-related anxiety storms are ultimately harder to bear, and contestants feel crestfallen and even stabbed as fellow contestants' kin and kith turn up their noses at them.

Ironically, setbacks like such confirmation of interpersonal uncertainty send anxiety winds spinning brighter and brighter, at hyperspeed. Reflections of their beautiful spirals onstage swirl in the eyes of transfixed pageant followers passing through those common streets on their way to work. How familiar. Isn't this the relationship often found between arts and their practitioners' suffering in our own reality? van Gogh and his stars. Munch and his Scream. Amid thunderous applause, the pageant organizer awards the grand trophy to a contestant whose craft channels his sensation of being a light, flimsy tarp sheet violently ripped off and spun aside as a retreating world collapses away from him — ambitious and illustrious bosses dissatisfied with his post-Xanax concentration issues, stressed colleagues accusing him of malingering, his coughing and hacking military veteran dad frustrated with a boomerang sick child who cannot hold down a job, demanding sponsors who forget that his anxiety is clinical unlike some contestants', one initially sweet girlfriend after another fed up with the constant need to assuage his breakup fears, spooked college friends who ghost him after his barrage of paranoid messages, soccer buddies turned off by his "effeminate" storm displays, green-eyed netizens who retweet stomach-churning tales about his off-screen anxiety persona.

The exuberant hosts invite the winner to step forward for a victory speech. But amid gasps from everyone on- and off-screen, the new Prince Pretty Anxious auctions off his glittering crown then and there to pay off his suffocatingly astronomical utility arrears. More than adulation and pity, he urgently needs fiscal redemption.

To fans' outrage, the winning bidder is a financially comfortable female contestant who did not even reach the semi finals. Her anxiety storm is a dim network of unshapely, muddy brown veins. Her attempts to sashay onstage during her round were met with scornful loud yawns from the spectator seats as she struggled to keep the vein network upright and fragments of the brown flaked off. In truth, however, the correlation between storm aesthetics and anxiety severity is not a simple single-variable equation. This other contestant's inner battle is severe enough to saddle her with breathlessness, muscle aches and extreme sleep deprivation. Her bid to help out has been pushed through the presently concealed vein network, along which not only the noisy fan protests but also triumphant fan taunts that would echo each other if she were to gift back the trophy pulsate. She deserves no less attention and care, just not through an award for vibes and visual appeal.

Lest we think the hype around the pageant is mere consumerist hypocrisy, some other fans speak out online in defense of Winning Bidder. The point of the contest is advocacy and representation, they argue, so discrimination of anyone because of his or her anxiety storm is a no go. Supporters of Prince Pretty Anxious retort that distinction is not the same as discrimination and ask what the point of pageant results is without distinction. On talk shows, cultural critics and wellness experts lock horns over whether pageants go against the trending social message "You're enough."

The controversy does not deter similar pageants from sprouting up. Nearby an open-air audition for one, an influencer couple happen to shoot a vlog episode showcasing their combined anxiety storm — a cool, clear breeze. Onlookers disgusted at the mental health flexing boo and throw leftover coffee into the breeze. Prince Pretty Anxious and Winning Bidder, who are there to cheer on contestants, separately but simultaneously call for everyone to calm down. The two of them look at each other in surprise. Winning Bidder explains to the crowd that celebrating personal excellence openly does not always imply shaming of those who do not fare as well. Touched, Prince Pretty Anxious pipes in that each moment of bliss or achievement is worth treasuring since tumultuous emotions are part and parcel of life and may visit upon even the sturdiest among us at any time. And, he adds, even if a life perfect from start to end were truly possible, we should simply give those fortunate to lead one our selfless blessings. Winning Bidder looks on in admiration. The smiling influencer couple whisper among themselves that they will soon have another telegenic couple as YouRockster rivals for eyeballs.

At this point of the last episode, the camera zooms out to a panorama of the city and zeroes in on sublime, uplifting anxiety storms churning deep within many individuals laboring far away, in grimy restrooms, maddeningly hot kitchens, shouty meeting rooms and so on. The physical beauty of each storm surpasses those of all the storm displays we have seen in the series. Yet the thought of signing up for any pageant never occurs to these insecure individuals, because they have no idea how pretty their dedication to their domestic or work lives makes them.

[soapver4]

Hungry Does

Spinoff Bubble: An ethnography-informed anthology that delves into gender psychology, power dynamics and moral structures through stories of wives who stick to convicted husbands. Depending on study findings, episodes include:

A determined woman whose husband did suffer a miscarriage of justice fights by his side for decades, despite suffering from the discrimination and abuse hurled at their family because of the infamy of the alleged crimes.

An insecure woman, like many, associates violence with manliness in a world hostile to even the roughest women. Like her husband, she believes each court verdict is a badge of honor, never mind the very real harm to victims.

An otherwise mentally tough woman brainwashed by her husband into pursuing a twisted ideology joins him in his pedophilic crimes. There should be a dinner warning at the start of the episode.

An emotionally repressed woman weary of being a goody-two-shoes to meet societal expectations of her gender, similar to the youngest daughter in My Liberation Notes, is attracted to a broody man whose law-breaking acts are his destructive emotional outlets.

A harried woman who finds divorce proceedings too expensive and cumbersome in the first place resorts to roping in her husband to keep an eye on their kids from his jail through all sorts of incredulous tricks.

A high-flying woman in a political circle doesn't want to attract public derision for abandoning her husband at the lowest point of his life or be seen as regretting her spousal choice. They have come to a tacit agreement to not talk to each other in private.

A filial woman's husband threatens to harm her parents if she pushes for divorce again.

A beloved, sweet woman incessantly excuses her husband's behavior and works multiple jobs to pay off his fines by herself, to the exasperation of her numerous relatives and friends.

A dreamy woman rejects overwhelming, court-acknowledged evidence of her predator husband's infidelity.

A proud, intelligent woman knows deep down that the man she is still in love with is a sly, heartless criminal who embezzles even her company's money but keeps fighting the justice system to deny this reality.

An icy woman who has grown cynical about the meaning to everything in life doesn't care whether her husband reoffends or not as long as they keep their financial lives as separate as possible.

A devastated woman who believes in rehabilitation and everyone's susceptibility to moral mistakes reasons with and guides her husband into turning over a new leaf. Time and again, she offers him chances. After he tries but botches all of them, she decides to file for separation in the hope that the disruption to the overfamiliar routine of their lives will spur him to work harder at change. Through much trial and error, sometimes together and sometimes apart, he finally quits his deviant ways successfully and they tie the knot again for good.

A foul-mouthed woman has a habit of loudly haranguing her husband for his criminal record, to the second-hand embarrassment of people around, even though he has seriously left behind his criminal life.

A fervently passionate woman with multiple degrees from prestigious institutions simply hungers for her husband, even if the world sees it as the most primeval form of hunger. She keeps berating us, the audience, for wanting to know more in this episode that pits raw desire against moral concern for the victims. "It's none of your business, period."

An emotionally needy and confused woman with a track record of guiltily cheating on her significant others believes she doesn't deserve a decent husband anyway. Are the wrongs on both sides equal? If not, do wrongs warrant a greater wrong?

A self-blaming woman apologizes for her emotional neglect of her husband, which she attributes his offenses to, to the befuddlement and dismay of the public, who want him to take ownership of his mistakes.

A now-ordinary woman leads an ordinary life with her now-ordinary husband. She has been hurt by the knowledge of his irresponsible behavior, but they are healing together. The audience yawns and the producers fret about viewership figures.

The eventual conclusion may be that while there is tremendous diversity and complexity among women, they are a group that still needs more financial, emotional, career and societal empowerment to make truly autonomous decisions about their romantic and family lives. Diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) movements have not yet outlived their usefulness.

This anthology has been conceptualized without knowledge of the BBC series Prisoners' Wives. You may like to compare the two and leave a comment about the strengths of each approach.

In the end, both Prisoners' Wives and My Sweet Mobster are perhaps just the start to an understanding of women around ex-convicts. The focus of the British drama appears to be jail time, while the Korean drama is celebrated for its romance and positive feelings and limited to a small handful of those women. Like what My Sweet Mobster suggests, there can be much value in looking beyond the surface.

[soapver4]

Global Fashion Police Mayhem

Media Format Bubble: Screen creatives representing their nations compete for the most brutal honesty in an omnibus series as each team produces an episode of television storytelling projecting how climate-destructive consumerist forces at the grassroots level of those societies will transform swathes of them into underwater, desertified or disease-ravaged dystopias dreamful characters longing for ages like ours and before in the distant future struggle to survive in.

That searing, potentially cathartic candor is a draw of Korean screen works (Parasite, Squid Game, Stranger and countless more on capitalism and/or corruption), another source of influence for this globalized TV adaptation of the novel New York 2140, but underrecognized by any international journalists and opinionators who still give the impression that Korean dramas are all about heart-fluttering romances. It also earns Germany respect as the European industrial powerhouse works hard at perpetual self-dissection of its World War II atrocities through condemnatory memorials and in-depth school curricula. Yet countries seeking to replicate Korean or German soft power do not always have faith in the value of putting aside their pride. In less emotive discourses, even, we could construe unflinching honesty as problem identification and confirmation, the cornerstone for solutions to suboptimality (read: societal ills). Unrelenting logic furnishes its own solution when stakeholders refuse homework.

Notice, however, that neither political nor industrial attitudes are the main theme here. This is not to absolve governments and corporations of their responsibilities for global warming. Rather, the motivation is to shine light on the less discussed issue of the culpability of the everyday person, who suffers from but also partakes in crowd pressure and opinion-making that ripple all the way up the highest echelons of the political and business worlds. To pin a hundred percent of the blame on feckless or greedy powerholders is easy, and there is little indication that public indictment of them will overall abate with time across the globe. To face our own flaws is challenging, which is why the honesty championed in the improbable series would be admirable and endearing.

The truth is, we are enforcers of greenhouse gas emissions whenever we perpetuate resource-intensive mechanisms that are but need not be integral to the status signaling, relationship cultivation or emotional homeostasis that keep societies running and lives afloat. These mechanisms include celebrating materialism, judging people for their luxury standards and fashionability, and upholding gifting practices detached from recipients' actual needs. Until technological advances, circular economy efforts and environmental policies progress and align sufficiently to reverse climate change, the redundant industrial production processes involved in the consequent effort to feel better about ourselves or secure societal acceptance are hurting the health and welfare of global citizens through well-known exacerbation of phenomena like heatwaves, severe floods and loss of homes and livelihoods. Here, the point is not whether those interventions will ever accomplish the reversal but the number of lives impaired or cut short in the meantime. Before desirable top-down decisions adequately arrive amid the inadequacy of alternate routes to the same material goals, we, the vaunted free market most capable of gauging demand, must change the goals ourselves.

Surplus labor and consumer finances freed up from non-essential consumption and the associated production, logistical and retail processes can be redirected to the various understaffed and sometimes underpaid services for managing personal and societal health:

Conflict management and mediation outside of the legal ecosystem

Counselling (career, emotional, financial, physical health, relationship, etc.)

Diversity exposure (across multiple dimensions and on an interpersonal level, not merely though cultural consumption)

Education (including cultivation of civil habits and tolerance and closer attention to holistic development through small, intimate classes)

Meditation classes and spaces

Other mindfulness exercises

Nursing

Psychiatric care

Social work

The key is to shift to an economy of inner calm and embraced interconnectedness that meets and forestalls psychological needs directly through non-material means.

There are three major risks with this economy: pricing, creativity loss and diminished career diversity. However, they are not inevitable or non-mitigable. Though surges in supply and demand of the services may not align well with each other and with income effect to keep equilibrium prices affordable for populations, this is an issue that warrants care and robust economic modeling, not outright aversion to the idea. Creativity and career diversity otherwise attainable through product design and marketing roles can be generated from within the services by coming up with electrifying variants of and marketing campaigns for the services to appeal to unwilling job candidates and clients, such as people who believe meditation is a yawner and therapy is for the weak. Think: A lobby where waiting therapy clients shoot pawpaw coffee guns at striking phrases like "Taxed Slavehood Underworld Rejected" and "O Never-ending Spiral of Bills" on a pristine wall.

While manufacturing, transportation and retail employees who are good only with hands-on work may not find suitable positions as readily, there are still opportunities in the broader economy, which has to explore new solutions to tackle energy crises and extreme temperatures. Urban heat management, for example, is an exciting area where career builders can flex their technical skills through green spaces cultivation, a myriad of cooling technologies (e.g. fog system, heat pumps, AI-driven climate controllers) and more sophisticated, adaptive architectural elements (e.g. dynamic shading panels, water-filled glass). Reskilling, a hot keyword in recent times, can aid them along. In the event some individuals simply have a passion or restricted skillset that cannot be expanded, a call has to be made between fulfilling the dreams of a subset of society and safeguarding the physical survival of the entire society, with the possibility of financial assistance for helpless individuals.

In short, the state of the world is increasingly compelling us to decide whether we should continue to party on as tangled linen in our global dance of "laundromacy," where esteem and bonds are smooshed out of fragile objects rather than built upon the ageless beauty of pure feelings and confident self and interpersonal knowledge.

[soapver4]

𝙱𝚕⧲𝚌𝚔

Element Hybridization-Expansion Bubble: Racing honchos amused by a woman angling for the male-dominated world of Formula One trapped her in a racecar museum.

The race started in a wooden shack in a make-believe area of East Asia. One of Sanya's earliest pleasant memories was sticking little thyme flowers into clay a teenage sister had just plugged holes on a bedroom wall with. Sanya later learnt that her sister was trying to undress in peace for once by blocking the views of creepers habitually lurking outside. One of Sanya's earliest nasty memories was another sister hurling a block of charcoal at someone who made a great show of oh-so-accidentally smacking this other sister's chest. And then, as Sanya grew older, she herself would wrap her tattered blankets and fraying bolsters over her head to block out noise from all the quarrels in their corner of the slum so that she could focus on homework.

The one blocker that truly enveloped her as a thick, warm blanket was the roar of racecars. Now and then, Sanya's dad would take her to his janitorial work at a motorsport stadium to develop a strong work ethic in her from a young age. Paradoxically, it became an escapist trip where tsunamis of howls from hot-burning engines and tires silenced the rest of the world with utmost aplomb, blasting away her household and money woes. An impossible dream was blooming.

Teenage Sanya wasted no time cobbling together her own plethora of sanitation jobs to afford race-driving school and tournament fees. It was a guilt-ridden path, having to walk a tightrope between her dreams and her family's needs. Eager for security, her sisters married early, although they visited from time to time. Pretty soon, they had wailing little mouths to feed. Each time Sanya came close to saving enough for a legitimate course — scammers were always just around the corner — her dad's lungs acted up or her mom had a slip at another janitorial work site, swaddling them in thick hospital bills. To spare her from the burden, her dad resorted to loan sharks. Before anyone knew it, the family was salvaging a door from a garbage heap to replace the one the loan sharks broke in demand for payment. To the vehement objection of her parents, she also replaced their fully functional basic phone with a phone that had a call blocking facility to cut down the harassment.

Looking at how busy older colleagues lost the motivation and tempo to pursue their dreams over time, Sanya resolved to keep hers in close proximity, even if she could not pay for them yet, as a reminder to herself. After the motorsport stadium was demolished, she would put up with long commutes to sweep away at more distant motor racing venues, on top of continuing soaping gigs at automotive shops and car washes. That frequently meant dragging her weary body home along dim alleys around the witching hour or later. Out of caution, she spent what little remained of her weekends picking up blocking karate moves from borrowed video tapes.

A meet-cute was not on her radar when she finally had sufficient financial bandwidth for racing lessons but, boy, a tall young man with lustrous, silky hair and lively, crescent-shaped eyes totally swept Sanya off her feet. He would step in for her whenever the other students teased the only "chick" in their program and whenever he spotted her imperious instructor, who frequently snorted at her maneuvers, insisting on wrapping his burly arms over hers in front of the steering wheel. This sweet guy's reassuring presence reminded her of her dad's towering figure from her childhood days. The afternoon she finished first in a mini-race in the school, though, an alien expression seemed to subtly overshade his dashing facial features. Yet he continued to shield her everywhere, impressing her further still. That was, until she caught him scrawling vulgar graffiti across her vehicle. Ah, human nature. Sanya chuckled to herself although the heartbreak of lost first love was setting in. Keeping a stiff upper lip, she sprayed on fresh paint to block out his creative references to the world's oldest profession.

The darkest time in a woman's life befell her in spite of the karate, just days after Sanya completed her first actual race. The series creator flatly rejects any ChatGPT advice to flesh out this part of the account. Sanya's mom flew into extreme rage on learning about the alley attack, alternating between spewing curses at the dirtbag and haranguing her daughter for putting herself in danger and jeopardizing her marriage prospects. It became the toughest perception challenge of her racing career: Why did she deserve as much criticism as the dirtbag? Hating herself despite questioning it all, the young woman dropped out of driving school, stuck to daytime jobs unrelated to cars, which drivers were more often male then, and wore long sleeves and pants that blocked sight of her porcelain-like skin even under blazing summer suns.

The shove that got her out of the rut came five years later, in the form of a matchmaker's visit. Suppressing mentions of the attack and then pretending it never existed, her parents had been pressing her to tie the knot with some man who could protect her and take care of all her needs. To their dismay, however, Sanya's long-time reputation for unwomanly ambitions and hobbies put off prospective in-laws. But now, a financially comfortable family shrugged off her past as a one-time, youthful phase and believed anyway that a tough woman with the courage to hold her own in a large company of men would raise tough kids that could flourish in this rough world. Her parents could not be more relieved. Yet, the bitterness of the idea of consequently divorcing herself forever from her racing dream overwhelmed Sanya. At the age of 30 by then, she stared down an automobile maker's promotional calendar, its tiny, skeletal blocks of dates carelessly flipping by in a blur in her mind.

Fleeing back to race tracks was not as emotionally difficult as she thought. Cloistered away from handsy instructors as a self-learner and overage for the usual chick taunters in certain places, she could glide without a care in the world in her vehicle, the whirring soundtrack buoying her along. Expenses were the killer hairpin bend. Rentals, insurance, race entry fees and vehicular inspection fees had only risen over time. Ditto for her family's care expenses. Still too scarred to return to night jobs, Sanya rang up sponsors, who chortled at her patchy racing record. Her only formal achievement was clinching fifth place as a novice driver in that one official race, a small-town one at that. As gingerly as she could, Sanya tried to outline the ensuing events and her lifelong circumstances without triggering a meltdown on her part.

"I see you think life has been unfair to you. The wrong financial background, the wrong gender, the wrong legal system. Everything is wrong, except you."

"Perhaps they sure look like excuses, and I know I don't have evidence to back up my claims. Even if you cannot believe me, I certainly hope you won't throw out my request just because I come from an atypical demographic silo. The other day, I caught news of racers who were given sponsorships despite taking years off to recuperate from physical injuries," Sanya stated resolutely.

"Don't you cry discrimination."

"Is — this not the headquarters I'm speaking to?" Sanya's jaw dropped.

"Yes, it is. And your persistent appeals to overturn a final decision are an obstruction of business and a pattern of wanton harassment. This is our last warning: Never call again."

Sponsor after sponsor, she found that in the days to come, their phones would be engaged and receptionists she visited would claim that nobody in their offices was free to entertain her queries. It dawned on her that she was on their block lists, like how the creepers, the loan sharks and the car vandal were on hers. The harrowing realization was the second greatest perception challenge of her racing career.

The medical situation in the family was more dire than ever. Superstition dictated that one or more single persons within must be married off to save the lives of those who would otherwise depart. Money problems snowballed. Tongues started wagging about the pampered youngest daughter's selfishness. The matchmaker made more calls. A family friend even came up with a new marriage offer, sitting beside Sanya as the younger woman hung her head over her thighs in a hectic hospital corridor and reasoning how this other prospective groom's job as a sports car salesman would at least let her live alongside the dream she could never fulfill. But did Sanya believe in superstition or selling herself to a stranger she did not love for money? Just as the exasperated friend rose to leave, Sanya softly agreed. Tried as she did, she could not get herself unblocked by any sponsor, but she could now get a lifelong block of guilt off her chest.

Intimacy was beyond traumatic for Sanya, but she did not want to be unfair, in her opinion, to her husband, who was not responsible for the alley attack. They soon had a daughter. Sanya bought numerous collectible toy cars, storybooks featuring fun automobiles and more for the little girl. Her husband did not like to be distracted at work too much, so the girl would read the car stories aloud at home while Sanya smiled at her and worked on problems in her own mechanics textbooks, never mind that an engineering or science degree was off-limits to a housewife like her in everybody's view. In the evening, mother and daughter would scan the television listings for athletic programs. When the girl was eight, however, she came home stormily one afternoon, picked up Lego blocks for a toy car and dumped them into a foul drain outside. Why should she be Sanya's puppet, chasing an ambition that was not hers, cultivating hobbies that only made her a weird tomboy in the eyes of classmates?

Before Sanya could react, police investigators ominously turned up. Court trials commenced in time. Casting a look at her, one audience member grunted that the incident was bound to happen when a haughty modern wife would not do her proper job. Nausea ensued in her as a willowy salesgirl 17 years her junior bitterly recounted what transpired after a manager married with a daughter and whom the salesgirl was uninterested in suddenly closed the door to the storeroom the two of them were in one evening. Sanya's husband vainly maintained that everything was consensual and that he did not force the subsequent abortion. The car vandal's graffiti about Sanya and the oldest profession in the world came flooding back. Her younger self blocked the letters, but not the words.

Engulfed with dark flames of hatred, Sanya sat by herself in a court stairwell and decided there and then that if that was the lot of many a woman, she would gun for the biggest riches of all. Nobody deserved a cowering mother. Ignoring advice to stand by her child's convicted dad, she crammed the essentials of the language of the country most renowned for its motorsport industry and began a double life there with the help of post-divorce child support payments from him and parenting loans from his family. At home, Sanya would whip up wholesome dishes for her child, as well as for local kids she babysat to cover some more basic expenses, and ensure the little one kept up with her studies in the foreign land. But while her girl was at school, Sanya would travel around, courting industry executives whose intel she gathered beforehand and dangling, in exchange for educational and racing sponsorships, dates in which she outlined bit by tantalizing bit revenge schemes to get even with their rivals. Fluency in the language would take time, so she made up for the deficiency with stunning metaphors and the verve in her melodious voice. One executive was so absorbed with her evil proposal, he suggested marrying her to spite a cheater ex-wife known to be condescending towards Asian people. Sanya winced but took it a step further in a split second: hire her on his events team and she'll be his.

Their second marriage was another double life. They would act lovey-dovey in public, then return home to bicker over the minutest detail of the home decor, each blaming the other for how their privileged upbringing or upstart status made them ignorant and unappreciative. Complaints that Sanya were abusing her position and connections to enter races persistently annoyed her new husband too. What did she care by now, though?

One day, a mass shooting broke out before a tournament, and Sanya's distinctive look made her an easy target, so she took a bullet to the arm. The sniper smirkingly continued to aim at her, but a man's silhouette blocked their line of sight. She gasped not just because of the danger but also because she was not expecting her second husband in this particular tournament. He swiftly tackled the sniper down to the ground and people nearby rushed to help, but a shot tore into his torso. As blood continued gushing out of the slumped man moments later, he wiped at the tears of shock streaking Sanya's cheeks, remarking with a weak smile that he would miss even their inane squabbles and urging her to continue chasing her Formula One dream. Then he fell limp.

His family did not take long to claw back his fortunes from her after the funeral. People in the organization also wanted to redeploy her to light administrative or archival roles, supposedly to relieve the burden of the grieving widow. However, Sanya fought fiercely for her inheritance and opportunities, intent on living out both her and her one true lover's shares of life. The protracted tussles caused a stir in the industry in light of her current in-laws' and enterprise's fame.

Over drinks one night, a bunch of bigwigs, including her late husband's siblings, joked among themselves about an Asian doll playing house with their cars. One sternly corrected them on the doll label — because dolls would not grow wrinkles — and guffawed. The others slapped each other's back in hilarity. Someone among them had a brainwave. Legal battles over Sanya's management decisions began one after another. She was not backing down but had nobody's back either. That was how the in-laws eventually dangled a non-compete agreement to her: Accept in lieu of all other funds and automobile ventures a fancy block of racecar museum they acquired, which they would finance to keep her there to her powdered pretty heart's content for the rest of her life, or else face decades of those battles and more they could conjure that would leave her scant time for racing anyway until old age.

Sanya had no choice but to sign the document in light of her first husband's prospective difficulties in paying more child support as a shunned ex-convict, her legal bills and her daughter's own college plans. The youngster just chuckled at this turn of events before heading out for a nail painting date with pals. Family and friends from their homeland called to congratulate their old girl on achieving her dream. Why, she would live and work among racecars forever. As storeys of sleek vehicles surrounded Sanya in the cavernous museum, located in a remote area, the heroine clenched her fist and thought long and hard as the night wore on.

Curious bills after curious bills reached the in-laws. First, there were numerous book purchases. Ah, yes, decking out the giant dollhouse with a comfy library. Next up were legal consultation fees and countless rounds of paperwork fees. Odd, but on further thought and checks that Sanya was not purchasing or leasing land or automobile venues anywhere, why not? Let the doll wall in herself with more storeys of her toy cars. But then massive demolition fees emerged one day. That was one maniacal doll. Frowns were all around by the time astronomical construction expenses started making their appearances. On one hand, the in-laws rang up government offices and their lawyers, who scurried to re-check the wording of the agreement document. On the other, the bill items made no sense.

The final set of bills was, nay, is for drone, vehicular and roadside cameras, among other communications equipment. It is the new 20s. 52-year-old Sanya gets into her driver seat, her eyes twinkling at @hypersecs.zip Gallery's livestream audience through her racing helmet. The five red lights illuminate one by one, then go out simultaneously. Amid the familiar howls of combustion and friction, her unemblazoned vehicle zips along a highway spiraling up seemingly endlessly from the old site of the huge museum block. A pink-orange afternoon sky beckons.