Serial Hecker

Geological horror. You find a geode and crack it open and the crystal lining its walls is human blood that can't be genetically matched to anyone. You find a human skeleton but every one of the bones is made from rock, a rock that you know can't be whittled into those shapes. You find layers of clay and loam that sport ancient fossils at the top and the still-rotting corpses of modern animals at the bottom.

This reminds me of the blood river in Antarctica. For like a century scientists had no clue why this river looked like, acted like, and felt exactly like blood. Turns out it’s just really high in iron.

Blood Falls isn't just high in iron, it's the byproducts of extremophile bacteria that have been isolated under a glacier in a iron- and sulfur-rich anoxic brine for the past 5 million years.

Photographed by Amiee Stubbs [website]

Someone will say "as a queer person in the heart of empire, my life is in danger every day" and you'll find out they're a developer for Amazon and live in San Francisco or Seattle or some shit, and then you'll meet a trans girl from Alva, OK who's like "Yeah, things are pretty good. AutoZone moved me to full-time."

Someone in a queer group in my current blue city said that they didn't like expressions of solidarity because it "diluted their oppression".

i think the reason i can't get behind the bender/nonbender conflicts as they're presented in the atla movie & lok is that in atla, the primary bending-based oppression is firebending vs literally every other type of bending - the genocide of the air nomads and southern waterbenders, the treatment of earthbenders in "imprisoned". in the southern water tribe and many parts of the earth kingdom, the idea of nonbenders being oppressed by benders would be completely ridiculous. you're hiding your bender loved ones from the people who want to take them away. maybe fire nation nonbenders would feel oppressed by benders in their own country, but they're not exactly being oppressed by water and earth benders. the idea that people 10 years after this war would think of bender and nonbender as more meaningful distinctions than nation just does not make sense to me. i can maybe be a bit more forgiving of lok bc it's later in the timeline & specific to a city with more unity amongst nations (thus allowing new divides to emerge) but i still don't feel like there was a ton of acknowledgement that nation was the primary axis of oppression for 100 years

the nonbender activists are always portrayed as villains but it's never framed as like. hey it's fucking wild to be acting like waterbenders are oppressing you when the southern waterbender population is only JUST starting to bounce back from genocide. wanting to eradicate waterbenders and earthbenders is old fire nation genocide shit and you're disguising it as "anti-bender" sentiment. i think lok did at least show amon targeting airbenders & highlight how awful that is but i don't think they were trying to establish that anti-bender sentiment was related to fire nation oppression given that one of the main equalist characters joined the movement bc a firebender killed his wife. the problem with anti-bender logic is that it lumps all benders together as one oppressor group with no regard for their actual histories, but despite showing anti-benders as wrong that's never what the show/movie actually critiques