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GUYS VOTE IN STARS AND TIME ITS SOOOO SOSOSOOSOSSO GOOD

Thank you to @sleepnoises for making the original poll & for giving us the idea to to this :)

Sorry if we couldn’t get your favorite on here, we were limited to only 12 options (11 if you don’t include the “other” option).

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Poly Team Best vs Clethubs

VS

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Sun Tzu is so fucking funny to me because for his time he was legitimately a brilliant tactician but a bunch of his insight is shit like "if you think you might lose, avoid doing that", "being outnumbered is bad generally", and "consider lying."

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Reminder you’re allowed to get bored of games. You’re allowed to put games down, and pick up other games for a while. You’re allowed to get burnt out from grinding, hell skip grinding all together and just cheat if you’re able. What I’m saying is, some games are commitments, you don’t have to play it like everyone else plays it, and just bc you don’t finish it within a week like everyone else, doesn’t mean you don’t think it’s good. So long as you enjoy the time you do spend in it, that’s all that matters, and you can’t enjoy yourself if you’re pushing or forcing yourself through it.

Social media has put so much extra added baggage onto games, and I just want to remind you that games, like all media, are for your own enjoyment first and foremost.

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i think we should remind musicians they can absolutely make up little stories for their songs btw. it doesn’t have to be about them at all. you can invent a guy and put him in situations to music. time honoured tradition in fact.

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book 3 sokka would beat the shit out of book 1 sokka for disrespecting women. its good character development.

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"This story was originally written in Arabic by a 14-year-old Palestinian girl in Gaza named Lujayn. Along with one of Lujayn’s relatives, I have translated it into English. She initially wrote this story for her mother and then decided to share it with the world. It recounts her family’s forced displacement from the house where they were sheltering in Khan Younis. This was the fourth time Lujayn had been displaced since Israel’s assault on Gaza began.

Lujayn describes an increasingly common tactic of the Israeli military in her narrative: bulldozing buildings with people still inside. In addition, Lujayn’s story serves as a warning to the world about the dangers of Israel’s threatened invasion of Rafah. If she were displaced again, she and her family would have nowhere to go.

Lujayn is a brilliant student. She had been planning to go to university to study mathematics. But there are no more universities left in Gaza, and Lujayn has no permanent home. All she can do right now is survive and tell her story. For Lujayn as for many Palestinians, storytelling is a form of resistance. She asks the international community to take action to stop the Israeli military from killing her friends and threatening to kill her mother, her family, and herself. She particularly asks that the people of the United States of America pressure their elected representatives to stop funding Israel’s genocide.

—Rebecca Ruth Gould

.....

I don’t know if the war will stop while we’re still alive, but what matters is that there are many people resisting with what is more important than weapons. Every day, a father walks under bombardment to feed us. A mother stands against bulldozers and tanks hoping to protect her daughter, knowing that even if she dies, what matters is that her daughter will live. A grandson carries his grandmother and never thinks of leaving her behind for even a moment. A sister pulls her brother out from under the rubble, away from death, and tries to save him.

Mom, this is my country, this is my people. Every generation of Palestinians will pass these lessons onto the next.

—LUJAYN, Rafah, March 2024

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Here’s the thing about the air nomads.

I introduced a friend to ATLA a few nights ago, and they had only known two things about the entire show: the cabbage meme, and that Aang apparently wants to ride every large and dangerous animal he can possibly find. We got through the first five or so episodes, and my friend noted that Aang is exactly what a 12-year-old would be like if given godlike powers, and that this is literally just what he could do with airbending. He can’t even wield any of the other elements, and he’s one of the most powerful people on the planet, because he’s an airbender.

And that got me thinking.

This snippet from Bitter Work is one of the few pieces of concrete information we get about the airbenders, at least in ATLA. Iroh is explaining to Zuko how all four of the elements connect to the world and to each other.

Fire is the element of power, of desire and will, of ambition and the ability to see it through. Power is crucial to the world; without it, there’s no drive, no momentum, no push. But fire can easily grow out of control and become dangerous; it can become unpredictable, unless it is nurtured and watched and structured.

Earth is the element of substance, persistence, and enduring. Earth is strong, consistent, and blunt. It can construct things with a sense of permanence; a house, a town, a walled city. But earth is also stubborn; it’s liable to get stuck, dig in, and stay put even when it’s best to move on.

Water is the element of change, of adaptation, of movement. Water is incredibly powerful both as a liquid and a solid; it will flow and redirect. But it also will change, even when you don’t want it to; ice will melt, liquid will evaporate. A life dedicated to change necessarily involves constant movement, never putting down roots, never letting yourself become too comfortable.

We see only a few flashbacks to Aang’s life in the temples, and we get a sense of who he was and what kind of upbringing he had.

This is a preteen with the power to fucking fly. He’s got no fear of falling, and a much reduced fear of death. There’s a reason why the sages avoid telling the new avatar their status until they turn sixteen; could you imagine a firebender, at twelve years old, learning that they were going to be the most powerful person in the whole world? Depending on that child, that could go so badly.

But the thing about Aang, and the thing about the Air Nomads, is that they were part of the world too. They contributed to the balance, and then they were all but wiped out by Sozin. What was lost, there? Was it freedom? Yes, but I think there’s something else too, and it’s just yet another piece of the utter brilliance of the worldbuilding of ATLA.

To recap: we have power to push us forward; we have stability to keep us strong; we have change to keep us moving.

And then we have this guy.

The air nomads brought fun to the world. They brought a very literal sense of lightheartedness.

Sozin saw this as a weakness. I think a lot of the world did, in ATLA. Why do the Air Nomads bother, right? They’re just up there in their temples, playing games, baking pies in order to throw them as a gag. As Iroh said above, they had pretty great senses of humour, and they didn’t take themselves too seriously.

But that’s a huge part of having a world of balance and peace.

It’s not just about power, or might, or the ability to adapt. You can have all of those, but you also need fun. You need the ability to be vulnerable, to have no ambitions beyond just having a good day. You need to be able to embrace silliness, to nurture play, to have that space where a very specific kind of emotional growth can occur. Fun makes a hard life a little easier. Fun makes your own mortality a little less frightening to grasp. Fun is the spaces in between, that can’t be measured by money or military might. Fun is what nurtures imagination, allows you to see a situation in a whole new light, to find new solutions to problems previously considered impossible.

Fun is what makes a stranger into a friend, rather than an enemy.

Fun helps you see past your differences.

Fun is what fuels curiosity and openmindedness.

Fun is the first thing to die in a war.

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i was genuinely surprised to find out that people thought that Zuko refusing to give his seat to Aang in Ember Island Players so aang and katara could sit together was Zuko having romantic feelings for Katara

because it really read to me more like ‘ex-Prince Zuko, who couldn’t see a hint if it tried to eat his head, fails to see the complexities of a romance going literally right outside his door 24/7 now’

he sat down and he’s being obstinate and refusing to move, its not PERSONAL for him, he’s just an oblivious dork

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Role swap au where Zuko was the Avatar who got frozen for a hundred years, so when he’s rescued from the ice instead of a goofy twelve year old Katara catches this mysterious teenager with long hair and a cool scar and a fucking DRAGON

Katara: BOY???? HOT BOY?????? HOT TEENAGE BOY?????????

Zuko: *speaks*

Katara: nevermind I hate him

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Public service announcement:

If you happen to teach undergrads as a teaching assistant, you will be given a certain amount of latitude depending on the gig.  Sometimes they’ll just have you taking notes on attendance and not otherwise be interacting with the students much, sometimes you’ll grade, give lectures, and have flexibility in attendance policies and rubrics.  These tend to involve more work, but are also more rewarding.

When they assign you to high-responsibility postings, you’ll also have a fair amount of independence.  Usually this situation arises because you’re teaching lab sections for a course with several hundred students in the lecture, and the professor has neither the time nor the inclination to read through everything that the students are doing with chemical titration or mineral identification or whatever.  They’ll tell you what to teach, provide some slides and some worksheets, tell you what grade distribution to vaguely expect, and then let you do your thing.  They’ll mostly hear about you if something goes really well, or really badly.

So here’s the thing.  You will, absolutely, get in trouble for going off-book and giving the students an extra credit option to collect a large number of dead scorpions.  But it won’t be that much trouble, especially if you play the naive grad student card, and it’ll take a couple weeks for the rumor mill to jump from students in your section to students in someone else’s section to another TA to the professor.  So you’ll have plenty of time to collect all your ill-gotten scorpion gains, and explain to your students about stimulated emission and coherence in light and how scorpion chitin is capable of a weak phosphorescence.  And sure, the powers that be can scold you a little bit, but for the rest of your life you’ll always get to be the teacher who collaborated with their class to build a scorpion-powered laser.

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me, at 8 years old: undiagnosed, unmedicated, sitting on the floor drawing my silly little comics about talking animals, ignoring the homework whose existence I already forgot about, blissfully unaware that I won't ever get an education to a proper real job unless I put my art away and focus on school. I will either die after a doomed and wretched life, or live long enough to see everything somehow turn out ok, and I have no choice but to be at peace with those odds.

me, at 18 years old: living a doomed and wretched life.

me, at 28 years old: diagnosed, medicated, in therapy, sitting on the floor drawing my silly little comics about talking animals, while on a conference call with an accountant about how to legally file my income taxes for my art. Never finished a school for a real job and never worked a day in a field I actually studied for, but I did live to see everything turn out ok.

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theres a popular brand in canada called no name brand and it manufactures everything you can imagine in a grocery store and it kind of makes me feel like im in a world no one bothered to do much world building for

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What's that bro? You began interacting with a media from a different country than yours and/or was made in time period different than the recent present day? Haha that's sick bro! Keep expanding your horizons bro! You're remembering to take into account that sociocultural norms, gender roles and genre expectations are different from what you are used to and meeting the story halfway, instead of forcibly superimposing your ideals into the story, right bro? Right? Right?

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If anyone tries to tell you that Shakespeare is stuffy or boring or highbrow, just remember that the word “nothing” was used in Elizabethan era slang as a euphemism for “vagina”. 

Shakespeare has a play called “Much Ado About Nothing”, which you could basically read in modern slang as “Freaking Out Over Pussy”. And that’s pretty much exactly what happens in the play.