disturbingly average customer service experience

Ok minor detail but ...

So I noticed in A:TLA, and it’s carried over in LoK, that Airbenders always seem to have an advantage in a fight. And at first, it felt like plot armour, particularly in A:TLA.

But when Aang fought Bumi, he lost most of that advantage. And I realised that this wasn’t just plot armour. Someone had sat and worked it out: nobody has had to fight Airbenders for generations. 

None of the other nations have had to train to face them, or practised sparring with them, or anything. Apart from Bumi, no bender in the show has ever even met an airbender before Aang comes along. And in LoK, for the most part people still haven’t. We never see fights between those who have (for e.g. we never see Tenzin and Lin fight); when Korra and Tenzin use airbending, its a unique fighting style that people aren’t trained to manage.

It’s a really small detail, and it fundamentally works to give the heroes an advantage (and make up for Aang’s young age and lack of combat experience), but I love how it’s an advantage in combat for completely logical reasons.

The detail in these shows is amazing. 

You can see the same principle in play whenever somebody fights somebody who uses a completely unfamiliar style. Combustion benders and lavabenders aren’t straight up more powerful, but they’re pretty much always something you haven’t dealt with which presents unique challenges. That red lotus lady with no arms is just a perfectly ordinary waterbender, but using forms and styles nobody else has seen before. Jet routinely smacks around benders and soldiers, but loses hard to the first person he met who had actually studied diverse styles of swordplay. When Toph invents metalbending, nobody can deal with that, but seventy years later the counters are pretty well known among people who might have to fight the cops.

And it’s why Azula, a genius prodigy who has thought long and hard about how to counter every kind of magic and martial arts out there, keeps getting messed up by a kid with a boomerang.

it’s also a detail from the second ever episode

aang straight up says to the fire nation guards on zuko’s ship “you’ve probably never fought an airbender before”, because he in-universe figures out that, if what everyone around him is saying is true, and airbenders have been extinct for a century (or at least have gone to ground enough to make people think that) then he is a totally unknown figure in anyone’s calculations

this has been brought up before but it’s also one of the reasons why hama is so thrown in her fight with katara - waterbending is about energy exchange, keeping things flowing, throwing your opponent’s power back at them and we see katara and hama do this in their fight. however, when katara is faced with a powerful blast from hama, she stands her ground and blows it apart:

[image ID: a gif of katara in the puppetmaster. she is a teenage girl with dark skin and hair and blue eyes, wearing a red outfit. she turns and throws her hand out, stopping a blast of water and turning it into a huge shield. the background is a dark forest. end image ID]

why do i bring this up?

because it’s a move - and a mindset - influenced by earthbending, which hama has never faced (she went from the south pole, to prison, to the fire nation). it’s an indication not only of katara’s skill and power, but also how she’s learned from her travels, and from toph

one of my favorite details of atla is how the main characters’ fighting styles adapt as they take on new enemies and make new friends with other bending styles. iroh straight up tells zuko about how he developed a technique for redirecting lightning by studying waterbenders, but if you watch closely especially in the last season, there’s a lot of this sort of thing happening unspoken with the gaang, using the bending forms of other elements like katara does above. it really shows the strength in differences and diversity coming up against a fascist regime that wants everyone to conform.

Look at Korra metal bending here

It’s completely different than anything we’ve seen from other metal benders, who bend metal with sharp movements like the derivative of earth bending that it is

But Korra is fluid. She is bending metal like it’s water. Because she is a water bender. And she is the first person in history to be able to bend both metal and water and so she is able to combine these styles into one and move seamlessly between them. This shows so beautifully how the Avatar is the embodiment of all bending

Every time I think this show has shown me all it can….it gives me more.

The fight between Tenzin and the Red Lotus reinforces this. Zaheer is pretty skilled for someone who’s only been Airbending for a few months, and he has the advantage against a lot of people because there still aren’t really enough airbenders for people to know how to fight them. But against an Airbending MASTER like Tenzin? He only wins because he has backup

I just wanna say that this mirrors something I got to watch in real life. I fenced as a teenager, with my wife, who continued fencing in college.

But her college had fencing equipment but no team, so she started coaching them. But she fenced lefthanded. She ended up with a team of fencers who almost ALL learned to fence lefthanded.

A small % of fencers are lefthanded, so even very good fencers are often NOT USED TO fencing lefties.

So her dinky little team of mostly newbies came in and fucked severely with teams of much more experienced fencers who couldn’t cope with fencing leftie after leftie. Her one protégé who was also very tall just laid waste to nationally rated fencers.

Whereas I, a very shitty fencer, can hold my own against my wife no problem, because I’ve fenced her from the start.

This isn’t JUST a fun plot point and a lovely way of showing social influences and planning and creativity, it’s completely based in real life. Even a shitty fighter can be a problem for a good fighter whose never encountered their style before.

My kids a lefty and confuses everyone when the sword and board fighting starts with a shield on the right arm. Right handed fighters don’t know what to do when their left arm shield is blocking a right arm shield. Meanwhile the lefties know exactly what to do, they do it all the time.

Every time the interpid heroes refer to "junior year" I (not American) get confused for a second because junior year should be the first one. Did I accidentally skip back to the first season? No this is your third one. How are you junior. It always takes me a second to remember that they're not named sensibly.

... do you not have freshmen and sophomores? were they eaten by drop bears?

We number our grades. Far less confusing. Giving them nonsensical codenames is a you thing.

Wait but if you number your grades then why does junior imply first year? Is it just that you're understanding it as junior referring to the youngest possible grade, hence first year?

Yeah that's what the word 'junior' means. You're starting out. 'Junior' meaning 'nearly finished' is so confusing.

I only did a quick look into it to make sure I remembered correctly, but junior and senior actually do refer to early/later still. Freshman refers to, well, fresh men, but was also used to describe fools. Sophomores is a compound between sophister and moros, and used to describe a clever fool (aka a fool but one with a little knowledge now), and junior/senior was once just Sophister (wise man), but it was split into junior sophister and senior Sophister, and later the original word was dropped and it just became junior and senior.

So it was fool -> cleverer fool -> wise man (early) -> wise man (later)

There WAS a logical linear progression of word usage, but when the meanings became relatively unknown and the titles shortened it became less obvious.

When I was a kid my family pretended to get raptured so I would think I was left behind on earth while they all went to heaven.

I was like 8 years old and my sister and mom had gotten really into the Left Behind novels (bible fan fic about the rapture). In the books when the rapture happened the clothes that people were wearing when they got raptured were left behind in neatly folded piles.

One day when I was getting home from school my family decided that they would leave piles of neatly folded clothes around the house, and then hide in the basement.

The intended effect was that I would get home and see the clothes then, think that my family had been raptured and that I wasn’t good enough to get into heaven… or something?

The problem was that I had never read these books, and didn’t really think about the rapture very often. There was no reason that I would see some laundry on the floor and think “The rapture happened and I’ve been abandoned by God! I’ll never see my family again!! Oh nooo!!!!”

I just sat down and watched cartoons and eventually my family got bored and revealed that they were all hiding in the basement.

It’s a good thing I didn’t understand the joke, otherwise that shit would have been traumatic.

Let me know in the next five minutes, because my show's coming up. ABBOTT ELEMENTARY | S03E07, Librarian

a fact about me is that i was an early bloomer who hit puberty in elementary school and was immediately, obnoxiously horny in ways that were uncomfortable for everyone because no one is prepared for an elementary schooler with b cups and a deep fascination with movies where people get tied up. another fact is that because i was considered smart for my age in the ways that mattered, i just accepted all this as a single package, the many ways that i was not really a child the way other children were children but was instead a miniature adult. i was technically a child, but not really, as far as i was concerned. it also did not occur to me until around high school that i was fat, because i instead considered myself to be sturdy, to be buff, to be built like a tank.

so somewhere around middle school i am noticing the ways in which i am Not Like Other Girls, the ways in which i am not what society says a girl is and the ways that things marketed to girls do not appeal to me. i don't know how other girls dealt with this, but i very rationally decided that i was only technically a girl, in the way that i was only technically a child. so i looked at the things that did appeal to me, and that i did enjoy, and reverse engineered my demographic to decide that on a practical and functional level i was a middle-aged man. i had also gotten really hornily into wolverine because of the first x-men movie, and ended up reading a lot of comics, so as you can imagine the comic book version of wolverine who is short and built like a tank and older than he looks despite being for all intents and purposes a middle aged man really had some appeal to me.

there are idiots who say shit about how tomboys would be considered trans these days or whatever, but i can assure you that was not what was happening here. by middle school i already had to special order bras and i was fine with that because of the many weird fetishes i was developing, none of which can be blamed on the internet because i hadn't found that shit yet and also to this day you would have a hard time finding anything similar to the things i wrote in my secret notebook and immediately destroyed. the fact that i was technically a girl was vital to all this. media where there was a big reveal that some cool dude had been a hot chick the whole time was my shit. weird feral beast people who turned out to be hot women once they took a bath? fuck yes. i would never have cut my hair because that would have ruined my chances to take off a helmet and reveal that i had girl hair. at no point did i think i was anything but a girl, it was just that i was functionally a middle-aged man, who was a girl.

what this means is that i still liked all the things i already liked, such as leather jackets and comic books and anime and old stand-up comedy, but i also did extensive research on the other things i felt i should like according to the demographic i had assigned myself. i watched vh1's 'i love the 70s' with the air of someone trying to hide their amnesia, even though my parents were children in the 70s. i got into the beatles. i tried to get into cars for a while before accepting that i only liked the vintage car aesthetic and couldn't be fucked to know actual car facts. i wore nothing but cargo shorts and aloha shirts for a while, which didn't really stand out that much because it was middle school. i bought a fedora and became a libertarian atheist. i made plans to buy a motorcycle (i could not ride a bike).

i gave up on it after a while because quite frankly my titty situation meant there was never really going to be a big reveal that i'd been a girl the whole time. it was pretty obvious even with the cargo shorts. also the older of a teen i was, the more likely it felt that i could maybe get laid, except i could tell that was never going to happen as long as i kept wearing cargo shorts. it took longer to give up the fedora because it was leather and i wore it with my leather jacket and fingerless gloves, which i convinced myself worked a lot better after i'd gone full high school goth. i lived in the desert so you can imagine how well that worked out for me, smell-wise.

anyway that's how my female socialization went, i don't think it was particularly successful tbqh

cis, but for fetish reasons

how i sleep knowing i will pirate every single thing released on disney plus

how y’all gonna sleep after your computers are infected with a bazillion viruses and the feds gon’ bust your asses

how i sleep when I'm pirating disney with a vpn and anti-virus protection.

How I sleep after pirating everything from D+ while using an antivirus, VPN or proxy, and a cantenna to rip off the free wifi at Downtown Disney. If you can’t get wifi directly from the house of mouse McDonald’s will do.

How I sleep knowing I’m pissing off all the Disney bootlickers by pirating:

Oh no! What a terrible thing to do, this information should't be spread by reblogging it, that's for sure.

people who don't wear glasses are so weird like you just wake up and your eyes are pussy fresh??

thats not the word I meant to use

None of these words are in the bible.

au contraire, mon ami

dont weird pussy, that's woke stale. penis absolute.

i’m sorry cock is in the bible?

Matthew 26:34 KJV

Jesus said unto him, Verily I say unto thee, That this night, before the cock crow, thou shalt deny me thrice.

huh i didn’t know edging was in the bible either

Of course it is, they've been waiting over two thousand years for the second coming

I was gonna say “what you think he had insurance???” but 1) at least in the early aughts to mid-teens, NY was one of the less excruciating states to get medicaid in, and 2) he was a minor and it’s a LOT easier to get medicaid for a minor, especially when said minor’s legal guardians are retirees on fixed incomes I’d wager.

So yeah they’re all just fuckin dumbasses! I love them.

This is why I think it would be peak comedy for the radioactive spider to be of a non-venomous species and for there to be a scene of a new Peter Parker/Spiderperson looking up the spider’s features or posting a photo to an identification subbredit before being informed of the fact that nothing will happen

entemologist reddit: oh yeah, that one’s venom isn’t strong enough to cause anything other than a bit of localized pain at the bite site, no worries.

Peter Parker the next morning, stuck to his ceiling: Well someone fucking LIED!!!!

Peter Parker typing out an angry internet rant to send back to the entomologist about “this is fucking bullshit I feel like ass I walked into six walls and I’m sweating fucking GLUE”

People keep asking him for updates and he does two more before deciding to become a superhero and deleting his reddit account

Six weeks later someone else posts about how “so that one spider bite guy. The one who kept. Sticking to walls. And this, uh. New hero guy. Climbing walls. Spiderman. Connected?”

Anyway shout out to Jason Isaacs for being the only person who went "wow this sucks!" when Sean Spicer showed up at the Emmys

I saw a post saying that Boromir looked too scruffy in FotR for a Captain of Gondor, and I tried to move on, but I’m hyperfixating. Has anyone ever solo backpacked? I have. By the end, not only did I look like shit, but by day two I was talking to myself. On another occasion I did fourteen days’ backcountry as the lone woman in a group of twelve men, no showers, no deodorant, and brother, by the end of that we were all EXTREMELY feral. You think we looked like heirs to the throne of anywhere? We were thirteen wolverines in ripstop.

My boy Boromir? Spent FOUR MONTHS in the wilderness! Alone! No roads! High floods! His horse died! I’m amazed he showed up to Imladris wearing clothes, let alone with a decent haircut. I’m fully convinced that he left Gondor looking like Richard Sharpe being presented to the Prince Regent in 1813

And then rocked up to Imladris a hundred ten days later like

Some people have been wondering about the raccoon. Listen. Listennn. Don't ask about the raccoon.

But does the racoon survive the Uruk-Hai? Does he curl up on Aragorn's head, or does he go straight to Faramir? Does he bite Denethor?

My friend. My colleague. My brother my captain my king. I too have been pondering this question, and in my mind there can be only one ultimate outcome.

A few months later

All hail the High Warden of Gondor.

Epilogue: It ADORES Faramir.

does anybody else remember that reality show where they gaslit a bunch of americans into thinking they were competing to marry prince harry but it was really just some guy

Thinking of the larger context of LOTR and like, the fellowship swapping old war stories and shit and Sam just says “Yeah I killed a huge spider…Shelob, I think?”

And Gandalf just blinks and is like, “You what now?”

“Yeah, killed it. Had to save Frodo”

Gandalf elects not to tell Sam that he killed the spawn of a primordial demon.

the daughter of the embodiment of darkness which ate the original sun and moon and almost ate the devil.

That's not important. What is important is that it was a danger to Mister Frodo.