oh my god that post where op claims her husband is missing but someone that managed 2 get in contact w/ the husband’s mother and is told that he’s trying to get away from his wife, who’s unstable, is so fucking scary
guys be SUPER careful about signal boosting stuff sometimes, i know you mean well but there are people there who will resort to lies and manipulation to get what they want at the expense of others
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.
Remember the Muslim group who started raising funds to help pay for funerals and medical expenses for the victims in Pittsburgh?? Well. They’re not done yet. Look at this
They have increased their goal several times and exceeded it within hours. HOURS!!
Here is their latest update
They’re asking you to please donate to their other fund, to help the victims of the shooting in Kentucky. These people are beyond amazing. They give me hope for the future and restore my faith in humanity.
They haven’t reached their goal with this one yet. If you’re feeling compelled to donate, please donate to the Kentucky fund. Because of everything else going on, it hasn’t gotten nearly as much attention. But these two peoples lives were just as important. They were just as loved and they will be just as missed.
And because they haven’t gotten as much attention and their stories aren’t in the news as much, here’s their story. From the fund raiser.
Please pass this around. If you can’t donate, someone who sees your reblog might.
Respond to evil with good.
It has been two and half hours since I posted this and the funds raised has increased by almost $2800 !!! This is amazing !! You are wonderful people for helping in any way you can.
Keep up the great work!!
PS: the fund for the Tree Of Life victims has raised an additional $11k in the past two and half hours as well. How amazing is that ?!
there are EXCEEDINGLY powerful and chaotic energies in this image
if you look closely at this you can see that there are way more jpeg artifacts around the eyes and the timestamp which means that someone either photoshopped them in and let it get deep fried over the course of a dozen resaves or someone went in and manually sharpened those specific parts. who did this
We really should be discussing the ethics of “designer babies” now because lmao that shit will become a more tangible reality for more and more people within the next decade 👀👀
oh we’ve been discussing that for a while now. i wrote a whole paper during my masters program about how even the concept will be massively influenced by social and cultural standards of beauty which are generally colorist, ableist, etc.
Sorry (this post wasn’t clear I meant to save this as a draft but posted it 😩) the “we” here is talking about the average person, not in the field or adjacent to it. I’m sure there’s tones of people in those contexts having that conversation now but in the broader sphere of everyday conversation
Also (I apologize again for the lack of clarification,) I’m not just using the “designer babies” definition that most people think of such as “lemme give my baby blue eyes cause aesthetics” but also thing such as gene editing so that your baby doesn’t get a fatal hereditary disease, prenatal screening etc.
And I mean “ethics” as in a more nuanced conversation
(Background:yes I’ve seen gataca, lmao I’m only talking about this cause I saw some articles recently about Iceland “eradicating”(their word, not mine) Down syndrome from their population and then I was reading more into it and I saw a wapo article calling it genocide, but the writer was pro-life and then I realized that this conversation is heavily linked to the designer babies convo)
oh i wasnt accusing you of like, being obtuse or anything. i just got overly excited that someone online was talking about this.
and yeah, i totally agree with you on having a more nuanced conversation on things like gene editing and such. generally when someone uses the term ‘designer babies’, i just immediately assume its for aesthetic purposes but there is a lot of good that can be done about decreasing/”eradicating” the onset of a hereditary disease if possible. i dont think i phrased it correctly either but when i said “social & cultural standards of beauty which are generally ableist”, i was also thinking of exactly how far we as a society would go to decrease the amount of diseases and how it could turn into a conversation about genocide or what THAT even means in the grand scheme of things.
background: i have no clue what gataca is, but that article does sound kind of interesting (and now im wondering what the writer’s background is or how well-informed they are about these kinds of topics). would it be okay if i asked for a link so i can check it out myself?
Gataca, I might be misspelling it, is some sci-fi movie from early 2000’s(?) about designer babies that my bio teacher made us watch. It was interesting but I honestly thot it was pretty nuance deficient but I reckon it’s hard to grasp all the nuances in 90 minutes
Brazil did it. Brazil elected a neo-facist, racist, homophobic asshole to govern our country and the consequences about it it’s already happening.
In less than 24h since he’s been elected it’s been hell of fucking earth in Brazil. Countless people have been reported dead all over the country, mainly LGBTQ+. Countless. People parading around cities with their fucking guns (it’s pretty much illegal in Brazil but this asshole is trying to change our law to allow guns, he’s even encouraging parents to give their kids a gun ????), shooting it into the sky in sign of victory. Did you know that one of those bullets killed a child? Yeah. One killed an old lady too. There’s been report of them invading a indigenous village and attacked them. They’ve been saying they are going to kill every single “slut”, “fag”, “dyke”, poor people, Nordestino (people that lives in Nordeste, a region in Brazil, that is mainly against this government), black and homeless people. Aka in the last 24h Brazil felt what is like to live in the fucking Purge.
There’s already people recruiting “good citizens” to erradicate Brazil of “fags and dykes, because now that their master’s been elected, there’s nothing protecting them, they’re not even people.” I kid you not. They’ve created group chats in popular apps to talk about mass shooting the LGBTQ+ community in Brazil. Yesterday there were people waiting outside a queer club to beat anyone that went outside.
Our police enforcement already started to invade college campuses and schools to destroy history books because they think our teachers are indoctrinating us in favor of communism. These history books tells about our 1964 military dictatorship (something we’re very afraid of happening again and we’re pretty sure is gonna happen with this demon in charge). They are trying to say that we choose to elect a military government back then, when in fact was a fucking coup. They’re also trying to get rid of philosophy classes and social studies because they think it only teach us to become communists as well. Basically, they’re all very ignorant and violents and they’re trying to fuck with the only fucking hope we have to our future: education.
You won’t probably hear many of the things I’m saying because I’ve been reading it on social media, and everything we (the opposition) say on social media is basically reported as “fake news” by his voters. But yeah, I can’t count how many videos I’ve saw today of women getting beaten and threatened. Of how many stories I’ve read of people walking the streets and cars pullover poiting guns at them and threaten them. Of people posting pictures of their “victory bbq” with guns spread in their tables close to their fucking meat. Of how many times I’ve cried since his pronouncement, thinking about how I’ve never felt so unsafe in my entire life. Of how I’ll have to be cautious about everything from now on, if I don’t want to become another casualty.
If you don’t believe what I’m saying, read about what foreign news are talking about us:
ForLoveFromFear 