#SEMimages

[secretmellowblog]

In love with how Victor Hugo just casually drops that Javert has Night Vision and then doesn't explain any further

Javert possessed in his eye the feline phosphorescence of night birds. He deciphered the few lines written by Marius,

Victor Hugo: Javert has semimagical night vision so he can basically see in the dark like an owl. anyway moving on--

[hardwareabstractionlayer]

First of all thank you so much for all the NiF archive, they're like a treasure for me! <3 The comics are unexpectedly fascinated, I'm reading 奇迹琰琰收藏卡 Yanyan Trading Cards by SemiMage and part 06 is deleted :( I tried to search for it, seems like the artist's Weibo may have it, but it's been too long and I don't have an account to scroll back that far :( Do you happen to have this part in your archive somehow? If it's possible I would really like to read it, thank you so much!

Really glad you asked, because I did save this miraculous series but didn't upload it for whatever reason...I've added a SemiMage folder to the archive, and do let me know if you have any other requests. Enjoy <3

[westeroswisdom]

Planning a career in academia? House of the Dragon is surprisingly good preparation – according to Joshua Kim at Inside Higher Ed.

The show you want to watch if you want to understand how a university actually works is HBO’s thinly veiled academic drama, House of the Dragon.

From the outside, a university appears to be a coherent organization, much like the image House Targaryen presents to the people of Westeros. From the inside, things can look very different.

Over the first nine episodes of season one, House of the Dragon beautifully captures the dilemmas that university leaders must navigate.

The story of King Viserys Targaryen amply demonstrates the limits of power and authority of any university president.

The provost of House of the Dragon, otherwise known as the Hand of the King, has the almost impossible job of keeping the knights (faculty) happy and the place running more or less smoothly.

Some of my favorite scenes of House of the Dragon occur during the meetings of the president's top leadership group, perfectly renamed the Small Council. Appearances by the relevant deans/lords—including Lord Corlys Velaryon as the dean of the business school (naturally)—always make for compelling viewing.

The role of the university endowment is embodied in the form of dragons. The house (or university) with the most and the biggest dragons (endowments) will always claim the top place in the rankings.

Observers of university life and viewers of House of the Dragon no doubt have similar thoughts. Wouldn’t things go so much better if everyone could find a way to compromise and share power and if women held all the top leadership roles? As House of the Dragon dramatizes so aptly, however, universities follow their own internal logic and codes.

Winter may be coming (a clear reference to the combination of the demographic cliff, public disinvestment and the cost disease), but the attention of universities will inevitably be focused on their place in the status hierarchy (the top spot in the U.S. News rankings made material in the form of who sits on the Iron Throne).

By disguising (if barely) their commentary on academic politics as a semimagical medieval tale, the creators of the House of the Dragon have created the most realistic portrait of university life yet to appear on the small screen.

Perhaps what happened to Lucerys in S01E10 is comparable to one academic department involuntarily being folded into a larger department.

Those scenes in S01E04 on the Street of Silk are reminiscent of some frat parties that I've heard about.

[craneca]

This mug I made during my senior year of study at The New York State College of Ceramics School of Art and Design at Alfred University in 1997. It was dark stoneware soda fired in the wood kiln. The tree-like drawings etched in the clay were inspired by scanning electron microscope photographs of blood vessels and made by repetitive stippling with a pin tool. Photo by: Justin Lane.

[roses-of-the-moon]

Tag game

Rules: Describe yourself with 10 pictures you already have without searching for new pictures. Tag 10 people (or as many as you like).

I was tagged by the lovely @briarosabelle.

Credits to: @sorakase326 , @loonatema, @itslopez , @semimage , @gittana

The cartoon and animes from the pictures: Wataten, Attack on Titan, Yaribu/ Yarichin b club(explicit, it's not for everyone!!), Tokyo Ghoul, W.I.T.C.H.

The songs from the fanarts: One&Only (Gowon), Eclipse(Kim Lip), Singing in the rain (Jinsoul), all of them are members of LOONA.

[xenosaurus]

Yes we do wanna know about fictional hunting dog breeds and semimagical agriculture! Yes!!!

(points) you, anon, are my kind of people

[cronencata]

A thumbnail commission for a friend! This one was explorative; the description I was given requested a woman who uses ( semimagical ) spraypaint to summon constructs, is in the middle of a battle royale, and knows she might not be sticking in for long- so she’s just a bit desperate... A fun concept to explore, for sure!

Special thanks to the commissioner- not only are they a personal friend of mine, but they’ve been making 3D models of the designs I’ve done for them, so that’s been really cool to see!!

Commission Info.

[unpitch]

@errorware: fuck it, maybe the earth opens up and swallows us whole.

"us." she's making air quotes with her fingers. because she knows, everyone fucking knows, that kind of shit doesn't touch the people behind the scenes of the game. earth could open up at any moment and swallow up someone on the field; just look at the secret base bullshit, the people soul or silk bean entering a tunnel below second and never coming back out.

(she's afraid of this a way she isn't afraid of burning anymore. because it's unknown. it is not the familiar fear she's carried on her back since being dragged from the grave; it's fresh like a wound.)

jaylen chews on the inside of her cheek a moment, letting words boil up in her throat before she lets them free. "i mean, i guess regular ol' sinkholes are still a thing, so, not totally impossible for that to happen to you, too, but — let's face it, dude, pretty fuckin' unlikely. unless you know something about next season that i don't —" and she squints at him here, like that'll get him to break whatever semimagical nda the commissioner's had him sign. players don't get spoilers, that'd ruin the fun of it all. (if any of them'd known about the burning at the start, would anyone have stayed?)

"whatever, though." blaseball bounces in her palm, up-down-up-down and out towards the other end of the field, straight down the strike zone. the imaginary batter standing at the plate watches it go past. "even if the earth does swallow me whole, you really think wherever that'd go wouldn't still have blaseball to play?" she makes a sound, somewhere between a snort and a scoff. "had to play in the trench. don't see why that'd be any different. so," she throws another ball. the imaginary batter fouls it away. she's gonna have to walk down the field and collect them eventually; the pile beside the mound is running low. "might as well practice."

[thepnictogenwing]

a selection of semimagical items. from right to left:

1. an orange glass bead in the shape of a Swiss cross, which we regard as a token of Katsuragi Misato (one of our system's fictive introjects), and symbolic also of our extremely complicated relationship with Christianity.

2. a slice through a crystal of the mineral andalusite (an aluminum nesosilicate) showing a cross-shaped pattern of dark inclusions—an "andalusite cross". another semi-Christian symbol for us.

3. a teardrop shaped pendant of dark red "banded iron" or "tiger iron", which makes us think of primordial Earth: banded iron formations are evidence of the "Great Oxygenation Crisis" precipitated by the flourishing of photosynthetic organisms on ancient Earth. this caused the oxidation of dissolved iron(2) in waters and the precipitation of insoluble iron(3) compounds, forming vast layered beds of iron oxide minerals.

4. a sphere of shungite, a carbonaceous rock from Russia. we've named the sphere "La Sforza del Destino", or simply "Sforza", for... reasons. we consider it as a sort of general symbol of unknown dangers and hazards.

~Chara

[karate-blues]

Commercial photography, as practiced in the 1890s, was not so much a form of applied technology as it was a semimagical act that symbolically dealt with time and mortality. Knowing this, you should understand that there was a direct link between photography and the presence of such epidemic diseases as diphtheria, smallpox, and cholera. These diseases were awful and perverse not only because they paralyzed and destroyed whole countries, but because they inverted a natural order. When such diseases created circumstances of fate so grotesque, so perverse that they permitted parents to outlive their infants, they permitted them to live on not only in grief but in guilt.

Michael Lesy, Wisconsin Death Trip

[heroofthreefaces]

Obviously a centaur would make a great geologist because as a fellow semimagical creature they’d be intimately familiar with

rocs

[secretmellowblog]

Jean Valjean really is the Most character ever, like he’s got everything: he breaks into people’s houses to give them money. He’s a cryptid who gets mistaken for a folkloric devil. He has semimagical super strength and parkour skills. He’s a symbol of the horrors of the carceral system and the trauma it causes. He keeps wigs in his pockets. He keeps “dying” and being buried alive and coming back wrong. His father’s name was Jean and his sister’s name was Jeanne. His entire family is dead or lost to him forever. He changes his name every minutes. He’s an expert marksman. He’s a committed pacifist. He once stopped a rampaging bull by the horns with his super strength. He’s fundamentally kind and gentle. He’s overly conciliatory and conflict-averse because of trauma. He’s inspired by St. Nicholas. He wishes he could die but feels barred from killing himself. He fakes his death and “feels reassured and at peace, as if he really were dead.” He saves people’s lives and then forgets they exist. He buries himself alive in a coffin. Every aspect of him breathes depression and weariness of life. He’s even a dilf!

[wizardedu]

Academics and School Organization

RIME has a particular reputation amongst American wizarding schools as one of the premier institutions for students with an interest in Herbology and/or Magizoology. RIME’s founder and his descendents had a great interest in maintaining a symbiotic relationship between the school and the surrounding natural environment. Naoki Maruyama’s love of California’s rugged coasts and forests influenced his decision to make the protection of both magic and mundane animals native to northern California one of the missions of the institution. RIME alumni were instrumental in pushing the non-magical government to designate many of the areas where Redwood trees grow as national parks and preserves.

In their first year, students are required to sign up to hand-raise a injured or abandoned nonmagical or semimagical creature native to the surrounding environment of RIME. They are expected to attend to the care of these animals without the use of magic. Common choices for students include everything from beetles, falcons, owls, deer, and rabbits to the endangered California Condor, California Sea Otter and Mountain Lion. This exercise teaches students responsibility for wildlife, an understanding of their place within the natural ecosystem, and helps them bond with fellow classmates. Students with like animals often band together to take turns in caretaking duties and swap secrets for helping their animals grow up healthy, strong, and ready to be reintroduced to the wild. If their animal reaches maturity or is healed before the end of their tenure, students are encouraged (though not required) to take on the care of a new animal.

Students attend RIME from the age of ten onwards, and are required to spend at least half their summers at the school so that they can care for their animal companions (though the school gives a particularly long winter break in order to compensate for the time spent at school over the summer). Students receive their notice of selection through firecall from one of the numerous faculty members of the RIME school. Students of any nation may apply for selection to RIME, they need only send in the name of the student by the student’s fifth birthday. Courses at RIME are currently offered only in English, but the school is considering (due to considerable interest) offering magical translating services for both Asian and Latin American students.

Due to its close association with its natural environment and with the animals that populate that environment, it is unsurprising that RIME boasts the largest number of students that become animagi. Demand for instruction on animagus magic was high enough that in the 1960s, RIME began to offer a two-year course on the transformation magic for those that scored high enough on their Transfiguration exams.

Students are required to take core subjects (Transfiguration, Herbology, Charms, Magical History, Creature Care, and Potions) for the first five years of their tenure at RIME. Defense Against the Dark Arts, according to the educational philosophy of RIME, is not its own subject. This is because RIME believes DADA incorporates various different types of magics which are better taught by faculty specializing in that specific type of magic (i.e. there are defensive charms taught in a traditional DADA class that are, at RIME, a part of the Charms program) After this, they sit an oral and practical set of examinations. Depending upon their scores on these exams they partner with faculty to design their interdisciplinary course load for the last three years of study at RIME, specializing based on their career goals and intellectual aptitudes. At the end of their eighth year, RIME students are expected to propose an addition to magical knowledge in their specialty, either expanding a set of widely held theories, contesting them, inventing a new spell, potion etc. or demonstrating a new application of existing magical theory.

RIME offers the following subjects to advanced students in their final two years, along with the ability to combine courses under the watchful eye of a faculty advisor:

--Advanced Transfiguration

Human Transfiguration and Animagus Advance Class

--Advanced Herbology

Herbological Research and Theory

Herbological Cultivation and Preservation

--Advanced Potions

Experimental Potions

Potioning Theory

--Advanced Charms

--Combat Magic (Including Defensive and Offensive Spells and Serving as a Training Course for a Career in Magical Law Enforcement)

--Advanced Magical History and Policy

--Advanced Creature Care

History of Creature Care

Magizoology Policy

Care of Dangerous Beasts

--Pre-Healer Training

--Advanced Astronomy

--Nonmagic Studies

Nonmagic Sociology and Relations

Nonmagic Technology Adaptation and Integration

The RIME school crest features a Redwood tree with a wand and a quill (which are no longer used in the school) crossed over it and stars above. The school colors are a rusty red (adopted by Maruyama dormitory), a deep green (usually worn by Wood House) and a inky blue-black (most loved by Skyline students).

[journalgen]

Bulletin of the Andalusian Institute for Semimagic

[a-shuriman-yordle]

Tales of Infinity

Send “Tales of Infinity” and My Muse will tell you a tale of their life, a random adventure, a vivid memory, a favorite story of legend..

“Once upon a time. A handsome devil of a yordle had tracked down a rare and valuable obsidian scarab inlaid with gold and rumored to have been part of a private collection of an emperor of old. It had turned up in a museum where they were mistakenly treating it as a rare piece of jewelry instead of the semimagical treasure that it really was. 

After many days of prepwork he felt confident that he could get it, get out, and vanish before too much attention would be drawn to him, our intrepid yordle stood up top of the building. Ready to break in and secure his item, the yordle saw something that gave him pause. Another person eyeing the scarab with a desire to rival his own. Not wanting them to ruin his perfect plan our protagonist waited with baited breath on the skylight. Curious to see if they could pull it off.

The person walked directly to the glass case where the treasure was displayed and as if on cue someone who had been violently stabbed wandered into the museum. With everyone looking at the injured person, the original human pulled out a stone with a runic glyph carved into its surface and began to melt the glass with some sort of magic. 

A sharp updraft blasted from the floor and blew out the skylight and had the yordle’s reactions been even a little slower he would have been shredded by the glass or found himself falling down into the building’s new orifice. He looked back to see the thief slowly rising out of the shattered glass. With a smile as wide as can be, I-I mean our hero plucked the scarab and the carved runestone out from the human’s grasp. 

The human promptly stopped levitating and returned to the floor next to the display case with a crash. And our mystery yordle happily escaped with not only his prize but an additional present, having simply waited for someone else to almost do his job for him.”

[thousandmaths]

The Integer-Magic Spectra of the Cartesian Product of Two Trees

This talk was given by Richard Low at SEICCGTC 2017. He cited Shiu as a collaborator. I actually went to this talk specifically because he presented at the problem-solving session and he talked to me about my problem and math in general afterwards. But I was happy I went, as you’ll see ;)

------

Let $\Bbb Z_n$ be the group of integers mod $n$. If you’ve never seen this before, you should think of this as like a “$n$ hour clock”: we let ourselves use the numbers $0$ up to $n-1$, and you can add a bunch of these numbers together and then throw away multiples of $n$. So, for instance, if $n=8$, then

$$ 1+5+3+2+4+4 = 19 = 16+3 = 3. $$

Now suppose you have a graph (as one does) and a labelling of its edges with numbers in $\Bbb Z_n$:

We can turn this into a labeling of the vertices by adding up all of the labels of the incident edges. For this, we need to actually know what $n$ is; let’s take $n=8$ again:

Perhaps you can now see that the example I gave you was rather special: every vertex ended up with the same label!

Whenever there is an edge-labeling of a graph so that this happens, we say it is $n$-semimagic, and if in addition none of the labels are zero, we promote it to fully $n$-magic. (Conversely, we say that it is not $n$-magic if for every edge labeling with numbers in $\Bbb Z_n$, there are two vertices that get different numbers.)

A few more examples you can try out for yourself, in roughly increasing order of difficulty:

All regular graphs are $n$-magic for any $n$.

The path graph with three vertices is not $n$-magic for any $n$.

The graph below is $3$-magic, but not $2$-magic:

Any graph which is $n$-magic is also $k$-magic if $k$ is a multiple of $n$.

A graph is $2$-magic if and only if the degrees of all the vertices are the same parity.

We can collect all of the magic data for a given graph $G$ together into something called the integer-magic spectrum of $G$: this is the collection natural numbers which contains $n$ if and only if $G$ is $n$-magic.

The conclusion of his talk was an answer to the question in the title. In case you’re not familiar, a tree is any graph that (kind of) looks like a tree.

Theorem. If $S$ and $T$ are trees with at least $2$ and $3$ vertices, then the integer-magic spectrum of their Cartesian product contains all natural numbers except for $2$.

But the point of the talk was really to tell us all about this neat algebraic kind of graph labeling. And in that, at least for me, it very much succeeded :)

------

[ramp up]

First of all, I should mention that he defined everything at the level of abelian groups, which automatically raises a couple of questions to me: what if the group $A$ and the graph $G$ are closely tied? It’s maybe too much to ask for $\text{Aut}(G)=A$ (because functions don’t usually commute), but you could certainly have $G$ be a Cayley graph for $A$.

Also, it’s hard to ignore the fact that the integer-magic spectrum is recording the subgroups of $\Bbb Z$ for which $G$ is $A$-magic. In general this collection is closed under supersets, and one wonders if there are other lattice-theoretic properties at play here.

Based on the divisibility example from above, I really wanted there to be some possible geometric connection here, by reducing the question from natural numbers to the prime ideals of a commutative ring (here, $\Bbb Z$). This method doesn’t quite work: as the main theorem shows, you can fail to be $p$-magic but still be $k$-magic for some $k$ dividing $p$. On the other hand, when you get right down to it and strip all the fancy drawings away, $A$-magic-ness really has to do with the existence of solutions to certain Diophantine equations. And algebraic geometry has, of course, been wildly successful in number theory.

The most famous interaction between algebra and graph labelings has got to be the chromatic polynomial. So I have to wonder if we might be able to set up something similar for magic labelings, and if this has anything to do with the algebraic structure of the group.

------

I’ll round off the post the same way that Low started his talk: with a recommendation of Gallian’s “Dynamic Survey” of graph labeling problems, which consists of “everything [he] could find on graph labeling”. That makes it every bit as extensive as it sounds— and also really dry; it’s definitely a reference text. But it’s a hell of a reference for essentially an entire field of study, and he’s updated it every year since 1997.