You're viewing the assemblag.es public feed.

Crystal Huff (they/them)crystalvisits@wrong.tools
Jul 18, 2026, 8:39 PM
Thank you for this paper, @emilymbender !
Side tangent, but a few years ago, friends & I wrote up a timeline of Chinese scifi. The earliest was a ~400 BCE story about a wooden automaton presented to the emperor that was powered by yin/yang principles. He insisted it be dismantled in his presence to prove there wasn't a man inside. People have been fascinated by tech possibilities for a long time! (You obv know that, but you might not know of this particular story.)
💬 1🔄 0⭐ 0

Replies

Prof. Emily M. Bender(she/her)emilymbender@dair-community.social
Jul 18, 2026, 8:40 PM
@crystalvisits I don't know of that story (nor am I well versed in Chinese scifi). Is your write up available somewhere?
💬 1🔄 0⭐ 0
Crystal Huff (they/them)crystalvisits@wrong.tools
Jul 18, 2026, 8:48 PM
@emilymbender heh. The pandemic started and everything changed and I wasn't in academia then, so it was a poster, and not a poster in the academic sense. 😅😅😅
I can dig up images of it, though! And we did make a bilingual (Chinese/English) version of it. The posters didn't include the context of what the story was about, though -- that's just something I learned from talking with my friends who read it in the original (Classical Chinese) language.
💬 1🔄 0⭐ 0
Prof. Emily M. Bender(she/her)emilymbender@dair-community.social
Jul 18, 2026, 9:02 PM
@crystalvisits Sounds very cool!
💬 1🔄 0⭐ 0
Crystal Huff (they/them)crystalvisits@wrong.tools
Jul 19, 2026, 12:19 AM
@emilymbender Thanks! 😅 I felt weirdly worried about replying because you're an actual academic and I'm a part-time masters student talking about a fun project I did years before I dreamed of grad school. Thank you for being encouraging.
💬 0🔄 0⭐ 0