so ummm welcome to my jar:) lemme show you around! theres some holes poked in the top so i can breathe, theres some leaves to munch on, and ive even got a twig! #mytwig
happy one year of this post. and from the bottom of my heart. i did not know what i wrought
The pool scene in Gideon the Ninth goes like this:
Harrow: *explains the elaborate 4D chess game she’s been playing to earn Gideon’s trust and regard* and everything has gone horrifically wrong. You’re my only friend; I’m at your mercy.
Gideon: *does not know how to play even 1D chess* *was under the impression they were playing a totally different game.* *possibly whiffle ball, or a game called “Harrow hates Gideon forever”* Holy shit.
Harrow is playing chess and Gideon is eating the pieces when she’s not looking.
Gideon is eating the pieces while Harrow is looking, Harrow is just either pretending it didn’t happen or rationalizing it as Gideon playing 4D chess that Harrow doesn’t understand.
In my eyes the twinyards never become the kind of siblings who insult each other as a love language, there’s too much between them for that to be anything but hurtful. Post therapy, even when they fight, they’re careful to not too genuinely hurt/insult each other.
Who DOES get the dubious honor of trading insults like a sibling with Aaron? One Neil Abram Josten
guillermo del toro said so many insightful and funny things last night at the frankenstein q&a that i started taking notes. these are all direct quotes. i love this man.
The US is crazy bc like so many people have intense conspiracy theories about the government like “I think there’s a secret elite group of people who control everything” and you can tell them “actually you’re not completely wrong, it’s just not a secret group of people, it’s a bunch of rich people and lobbyists who are doing it all out in the open” and they’ll be like “hmmn I don’t think it’s THOSE people though. I prefer my racist & antisemitic theories”
They’ll be like “I heard there’s a powerful ring of pedophiles who are influencing the country” and you’ll tell them “I mean yeah that’s what the Epstein files are about” and they’ll say “no I’m pretty sure this has to do with The Queers actually”
Conspiracy theory no one will ever accept: What if the people secretly controlling the world are the same people obviously controlling the world?
don’t infantilise yourself. you are not a child who needs an adult to make your decisions for you. you are a splendid and magnificent autocrat and you are consulting your trusted advisors. you are exercising great wisdom by inviting an expert to give their opinion before making your ruling. often the path of wisdom is to say “good morning, I’m trying to [perform task] and I have a question about [aspect], can you tell me who I should speak to for advice?” before you do it. sometimes the path of wisdom is to hire a plumber. there are times when you cannot do things for yourself but that doesn’t mean you are not an adult. you don’t need a grown-up. you need a specialist.
Sucks that all the animals that are as smart as we are don’t have highly developed language centers. I just want to discuss the finer points of philosophy with a parrot.
I wanna live in a world where I can yell at a raven to get off my roof and it can tell me to fuck off.
In their language or mine. I’m willing to learn Raven language if it means that I can tell them where the good trash bins are.
I just imagined a raven running a language class pointing at pictures on a PowerPoint with his beak and making squawking noises and a bunch of 19 year old undergrads attempting to squawk back at him.
I don’t think there’s any justification for forcing ravens to learn how to use Powerpoint
Excuse you sharing his language with the youth is his passion in life
Excuse you sharing
his language with the youth is
his passion in life
Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.
I think about Azula shooters often and their common refrain of “if Azula hadn’t had a mental breakdown, she would’ve won” and I’m here to tell you that no, she wouldn’t have.
There is no universe in which Azula was winning that fight with Zuko (or Katara, for that matter).
Azula spent so much of Book 2 being built up as this deadly terrifying force against whom the heroes are badly outmatched that it can be difficult to catch exactly how quickly Zuko is advancing.
Back up a bit to Book One. For the fearsome exiled crown prince of the Fire Nation, Zuko’s not that impressive a firebender. He’s not bad by any stretch, and he’s able to lay the untrained Sokka and Katara flat pretty easily. Then he gets in the ring with Aang, who is an airbending master, and the difference between a regular bender and a master becomes apparent when Aang literally puts his ass to bed:
People have attributed this to the fact that no one’s fought an airbender in 100 years, but I think it’s also worth noting that Aang (a 12 year old from a pacifist nation) has probably never fought anyone before. Like, ever. And yet the second Aang thinks “okay, I’ll attack back”, the fight’s over.
Zuko’s got the same genetic predisposition for firebending talent that Azula does, yet it never seems to manifest because of his mental blocks. At the beginning of the series, he’s already so beat down that all he really has is conviction, pride, and anger, so even with training from Iroh (the firebending master, thank you very much), he struggles. Yet throughout Book 2, when he has no time to train because he’s on the run, he actually seems to advance faster. The fact that his bending is literally tied to his character arc (as his morals become tangled and he has to fight off aforementioned mental blocks) is pretty brilliant. Like, by the time of the Crossroads of Destiny, Zuko getting his ass handed to him by Aang is a pretty consistent feature of the show–he just can’t match wits with him.
Hell, at the beginning of the series, he and Iroh (again: the actual firebending master) launch a combined power surface-to-air attack…which Aang casually swats away into a nearby ice wall. Come the Crossroads of Destiny, however, and Zuko by himself launches this bigass fireball that blows through Aang’s defenses.
Zuko advances so quickly that it’s scary. That prodigious talent is in him even if it doesn’t come through as cleanly as with Azula. Who, by the way, was busy about to get flattened by Katara some few dozen feet away, until Zuko took over and then effectively stalemated her himself.
All of this in retrospect makes it abundantly clear why Zuko’s firebending seemed to skyrocket so much when he learned true firebending from the Sun Warriors: it was really the only thing left. He’s hard a hard road learning how to fight waterbenders, earthbenders, and airbenders, and even if unconsciously, he’s applying the philosophy Iroh taught him about augmenting his bending style with aspects of other styles (see also, the waterbending-like fire whips he uses in the above gif). Once he actually understands fire and how it works, he’s got it mastered. Hence why any gap between him and Azula effectively disappears as soon as their next fight–before her friends have betrayed her and her stability goes out the window. There’s no real sense of urgency to their fight at the Boiling Rock prison. True, Sokka’s presence with the sword helps, but Zuko doesn’t look remotely worried and he counters Azula’s every attack perfectly.
All her life, Azula only ever learned fire. She was taught by the best people the fire nation can employ, so she knows all the cool tricks, but she’s still poisoned by the corrupted firebending practiced in the modern ATLA timeline. Unlike Zuko, who managed to get the basics if nothing else from Iroh (fire comes from the breath, and can be used to survive as much as to kill), Azula has always used fire as a weapon and a means to hurt others. She has no true knowledge of the craft, meaning she’s got the same weaknesses as Zhao, she’s just better disciplined to the point she can make up for it.
Zuko’s victory was a given considering Azula’s complete loss of control by the time of Sozin’s comet, but even had she been in a perfect mental state, she’d have lost, because in many ways Zuko is simply the better firebender.
the innkeeper tells my valiant and brooding sword-wielding companion that there is only one bed. luckily ☝️ i never go anywhere without my Therm-a-Rest NeoAir XLite NXT Sleeping Pad (size regular/short, 11.5oz)
me sleeping like a baby outside the tavern
love the idea you’re not setting this up on the floor inside the room.
when i have a cold-weather sleeping bag and merino base layers?? i have to laugh.
In the meantime, your valiant and brooding sword-wielding companion freezes their ass off in the inn, misplacing a couple vertebrae on what is mockingly referred to as “a bed.”
Which will probably not help with the brooding for a couple days.
damn I could’ve prevented this if I’d had the foresight to also carry a second Therm-a-Rest NeoAir XLite NXT Sleeping Pad (size large/wide, 1 lb 1oz)
ALT
