sometimes

on summer & its hauntings, of which you are one: your childhood is over. your childhood sleeps in the bed next to you at night. your childhood is buried beneath your parents' back porch. you are always out of time.

If we couldn't get Jill, then we should've been playing as Sherry in RE9. She was the person in RC the longest. Was probably born there, and just.

The feeling of something both familiar and unfamiliar when visiting places you haven't been too since you were a child. Realizing the structures you thought were huge were actually tiny. Recognizing names from broken street signs and remembering long car rides and the conversations that happened along them. Seeing a place you grew up with destroyed and unrecognizable in the way that you know how it looked but are unsure how much of your own memory to trust. Remembering faces but not names until she reads old documents and files that should've been weathered into dust by now, and wondering if she knew them personally albeit briefly or actually only heard about them from stories.

Reliving her trauma from within the police station and facing the demons from her last time with her parents as a perfect mirror to Grace. Her seeing Grace running around with a small defenseless child and turning on every thing she learned from Claire with her behavior to make sure everyone is okay and reassure them they're all getting out. The horror at seeing Emily changed and realizing how that absolutely could've been her in RC and having to take the shot anyway. Seeing Zeno and being so in her own grief and nostalgia she slips up and says "Uncle Wesker?" Something she hadn't uttered in decades only to get an apathetic gaze and ignored in return. Combat that utilizes her strength and healing factor from the G-virus. The commander aka Hunk presenting an actual threat considering his original job was to get a G-virus sample and here's the culmination of what a perfect super soldier would look like with Sherry right in front of him.

A doodle for today's match between Japan and Brazil. The banter between the two about their national soccer teams would be very much entertaining!

Carlos's last drawing was just too much fun. I only did a rough sketch of this doodle last time. Now I've finished it.

i came out to my grandma at the beginning of the year over the phone. She really didn't (and I knew) know what transgender was or anything but this past weekend, we were able to see each other in person for the first time since i started my transition. For being 84 years old, the chat went as great as it could have gone! She caught me as I was leaving and she gave me a silver bracelet with turquoise and coral stones. She told me that this style is what Navajo women wear.

And was like, uh, are you missing something there, buddy? Like all that red in northern Africa? Because that's a lot of red.

And I was going to give them the benefit of doubt, since I don't know much about the climate in Northern Africa, aside from Morroco and Egypt, which seem like really hot places, so you know, maybe it's normal there?

But nope, that's not the case:

Some selections from the article:

"The region has been experiencing some of the most intense heat waves in recent years, but in many cases they’ve been under-reported due to misconceptions about Africans’ ability to withstand them.

“Africa is seen as a sunny and hot continent,” said Amadou Thierno Gaye, a research scientist and professor at Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, the capital of Senegal. “People think we are used to heat, but we are having high temperatures for a longer duration. Nobody is used to this.”

I just remembered that this was a thing that was HILARIOUS in 2006 and apparently that was ten years ago now.

Old people: join with me in remembering how funny we found this on LiveJournal.

Young people: look at this lolrus, it’s so happy, it has a bucket.

I finally finished it...

I think I redid it like 4 times, and I still not satisfied with the end result, but to this point I'm tired,

maybe I'll redo it somewhere in the future, who knows ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

probably the best example is the katara vs pakku fight, cause like. any other show would probably have katara kick his ass, and that would convince him to teach her and also drive home the girl power theme. the conflict of the story is katara not being allowed to fight bcause girls are considered too weak; if she loses a fight to a man, then it just proves him right, she has to win. but that’s why the message always falls flat in other stories, because it wouldn’t make any sense for katara to beat pakku in that fight. she’s a teenager with literally no training, and has spent all season struggling to teach herself the basics, while pakku has decades of experience and is one of the most skilled waterbending masters in the world. if katara won the fight, it would be contrived bullshit, and make the intended feminist themes painfully heavy handed, and a blatant token effort. but instead, we get a hardcore two minute smackdown of katara trying to murder the everloving shit out of pakku, and making him work to kick her ass. like yeah she loses, but it’s a vicious fight, she manages to hold her own despite all the odds stacked against her, and it’s the first real display of intense combat waterbending in the show. and despite losing the fight, she still wins the overall argument, because she successfully gets through to pakku about the patriarchal system being damaging to everyone - up to and including him.

and pakku. doesn’t. care.

she does not successfully get through to pakku about the patriarchal system being damaging to everyone. she doesn’t get through to him about anything. because at the end of their fight, pakku says ‘lol doesn’t matter i’m still not gonna train you’. and that would’ve been the end of it, if pakku didn’t notice katara’s necklace and recognize it as the betrothal necklace he’d made for kanna decades earlier.

he only agrees to train katara because he was in love with her grandmother. (and it kind of seems insidiously gross when you consider the fact that he tracks kanna back down in the south pole and marries her off screen, making it seem like he only agreed to train katara to get in good with her grandma when he went to find her again. all of this ignoring the fact that he was at least part of the reason she ran from the northern tribe in the first place.) there’s no evidence that anything actually changed in the tribe, by the way. to my recollection, katara is the only girl we see training with pakku after that fight. none of the other girls seem to be taking lessons from him, and there’s never any indication that things changed long term, either.

for all we know, katara was the Exception to the Rule and the northern tribe went right back to saying ‘girls belong in the healing huts while the boys learn to fight’.

if you’re not forgetting it, we also don’t get to see how the fn and the wt celebrate birthdays so what’s your point?

The single existing exception to this is the Kyoshi novels, which a) were not written by Michael or Bryan, and b) came out eleven years after the show ended, which is far too little, far too late for me to give the creators credit for the worldbuilding (especially since, again, neither of them wrote the books; that credit should go to FC Yee).

We may not see how birthdays are celebrated in the other cultures, but we see how their governments function. We see how and why their belief systems developed, and what those systems were rooted in. We get to meet spirits who are crucial to the development of the other cultures–the dragons and Tui and La in particular. We get to see the flaws of each of the other nations, too–we get to see where their predispositions lead them, and where they falter because of their belief systems.

We get none of that for the Air Nomads. All we know about them is based on the existence of a handful of artifacts, Guru Pathik’s lecture about chakras (which was never once revisited after book 2), a handful of sayings that Aang parroted from the monks who raised him without any evidence of wisdom or understanding, and an alleged dedication to pacifism to an extent that flies in the face of one of the first things we learn about the Air Nomad genocide, which is that Monk Gyatso killed a whole bunch of Fire Nation soldiers in defense of his temple.

There obviously should have been many Air Nomads left in the world. Genocides usually don’t manage to kill everyone! The Air Nomads had friends in all Nations and they could fly on Sky Bisons. The writers managed to hide Appa from the Gaang for half a season in Book 2! I’m sure there would have been room to hide Airbenders around the entire world.

It’s been theorized many times that Ty Lee was a descendant of the Air Nomads who was a non-bender. Through her, the writers could have introduced her grandparents and other survivors, and they could have taught Aang and Ty Lee about Air Nomad culture, stories of how they lived back at the Temples, and stories of how they survived and, at times, thrived. Ty Lee was friends with Azula, the Fire Nation Princess! I think we can call that “thriving”.

After introducing Ty Lee’s family and, say, their village of Air Nomad survivors, we could have learned about a whole network of Air Nomads who survived and kept in touch. Keeping traditions alive, from foods to clothings to festivals, while adapting their lifestyles to their new environments.

Some people could move back to the Air Temples who are being rebuilt by a group of Earth Kingdom, Fire Nation and Water Tribe peoples, lead by Aang of course, while others could keep to their new ways. More Air Nomads could be born, non-benders and benders alike, and they’d all still be Air Nomads.

It would have been so interesting to see!

When this topic comes up I keep hearing the same excuse, that all the Air Nomads were dead so there was no way for us to get any real insight into their culture, but like… that was a deliberate choice on the part of the creators. And it makes very little sense–how are you expecting your audience to believe that a nomadic people were completely wiped out (when that has never, in the history of this planet, been how genocides actually work–there are always survivors and descendants), and then show us hidden societies and secret tribal offshoots of the other nations that virtually no one knew existed?

If the Sun Warriors and the Foggy Swamp tribe managed to remain completely off the global radar for however long their societies have existed apart from the Fire Nation/Water Tribes, why are we supposed to believe it’s completely impossible for any of the Air Nomads to have survived the past century? And why is this an excuse for laziness in the worldbuilding when it was very much a deliberate choice, and nothing mandated that they not devote any time or energy to uncovering information about the Air Nomads both past and present?

Book 3 actually would’ve been a perfect time to have Aang’s rosy-colored view of his people challenged by showing him that not only were the descendants of his people still alive (and while I do love the idea of the show having gotten a book 4 for all of this, how poetic would it have been for him to discover that his people were still alive in a book devoted to the element that destroyed them?), but that there was more to his culture than pacifism and catchy proverbs?

Anyway, the ultimate point is that they could have given us a show in which the main character’s people and culture are explored in at least as much depth as the other three nations, and they chose not to. (Especially since, as someone else pointed out in the notes, they used flashbacks to show us plenty of information about what occurred decades and even centuries before the events of the show. They could have done more with the flashbacks of the monks than they did.) And that is what annoys me.

after letting it brew for a while, discussing a bit with others and reading other people's opinions on it, i feel like i have fully solidified what my thoughts are on it (spoiler, theyre not good)

im focusing more on the characters here, since everyone has already done a wonderful job dissecting the plot of the movie (and how it serves no purpose + the holes it has)

long post ahead so beware, everything is under the cut to prevent spoilers + to not have a whole wall of yapping out there. im gonna be sectioning this in specific points i want to talk about (both what i liked and what i didnt like in the movie)

disclaimer: i am NOT gonna be arguing about zutara here. i am a shipper and im not gonna stop liking them, and they are tagged because frankly its relevant to the topic

everything below the cut, NOT spoiler free !!! movie screenshots added aswell !!!

I didn't go over it a ton in my posts about the movie, but the fact that Katara quite literally brought herself and her best friends back from the dead and, as far as we can tell, felt nothing about that is just.... utterly insulting. We don't even get to see it, except for a brief moment of her yelling Aang's name and then a two-second flashback of her surrounded by the dead bodies of her brother and friends and not even a moment's panic, hesitation, grief, anguish.... nothing.

The most emotion we get from her the entire movie is right before that, when she's yelling for Aang, but even that performance felt incredibly phoned-in. Nevermind that it doesn't actually make sense, because how would her healing abilities have kicked in while she was dead--which also leaves the question of how dead is dead to be bafflingly glossed over--but they could have so easily fixed this by, I don't know, letting us see the aftermath of the fight and of Katara's struggle in bringing her friends and brother back from the brink, maybe even them finding Aang's body afterwords, let them all sit with that loss for a moment, but that would require the movie to care about anyone not named in the title and it barely even cared about him.

And in fact none of them feel anything about dying, or almost dying, or about Aang dying, they're right back to business five seconds later and they all look sadder about Appa being missing (and where have we heard this story before) than about what they'd just been through.

But no, the movie spent too much time on a bunch of new characters who will ultimately mean nothing to anyone because they effectively don't exist in the sequel series and all other post-canon materials (and could not affect the storyline or world in any meaningful way without completely altering the trajectory of the future already set by said sequel). Made me think of that dril budget meme.

From the article:

“If you look only at the trend of species declines, it would be easy to think that we’re failing to protect biodiversity, but you would not be looking at the full picture,” said Penny Langhammer, lead author of the study and Executive Vice President of Re:wild. “What we show with this paper is that conservation is, in fact, working to halt and reverse biodiversity loss. It is clear that conservation must be prioritized and receive significant additional resources and political support globally, while we simultaneously address the systemic drivers of biodiversity loss, such as unsustainable consumption and production.”

This massive meta analysis (for those not familiar, a study analyzing the results of many studies on similar topics) found that the vast majority of conservation efforts show much much better results than doing nothing. In many cases, biodiversity loss was not only stopped but reversed.

Forty years ago there were zero condors in the wild.

There are over 300 condors now, free and wild and breeding by themselves without our help.

We did that. We did. Lots of people said "that's stupid, you won't succeed" but people made condor puppets and they said "fuck you we're gonna try anyway" and they fed the babies and raised them up wild and did their best with their big human brains and human cooperation and WE FIXED IT!!!!

YOU ARE NOT THE FIRST GENERATION TO CARE.

YOU ARE NOT THE ONLY PERSON WHO CARES.

IT IS NOT HOPELESS.

Indeed it is! The FCC controls how much of broadcasting has to cater to children and that includes how educational that programming has to be, and exactly how much and in what way you are allowed to advertise to kids. That's why for the entire 90s and up to the early 00s, kids shows had shorter commercial breaks, and ads that talked about a website had to say "ask your parents before going online", and those websites had to be non-commercial--i.e. they could not be shops, and could not have any way you could spend money or were encouraged to spend money. That's why Barbie.com was flash games, and O'Rielly LIFTING that ban is why Barbie.com now takes you directly to a storefront instead.

If you're mad about Saturday Morning Cartoons, dark patterns in ads targeted at children, online protections for kids, or wondering why educational children's shows aren't as much of a thing as they used to be, get mad at the FCC and the person in charge of it who is gutting the Children's Brodcasting Rules (sometimes called the Kid Vid Rules), because those rules control all of that!

While O'Rielly is responsible for gutting the rules in 2019, he was replaced in 2020 by Nathan Simington as head of the FCC, and Simington resigned in June of this year. The post remains vacant as of the time of this writing (August 31, 2025).

(For context, apparently this is from Avatar, the Last Airbender: Legacy, which came out in October 2015. Given its contents, I’m no longer surprised that it had much less of an impact on the fandom [I’d only vaguely heard reference to it in the past and never seen images or excerpts from it] than Legacy of the Fire Nation, despite the latter having come out only two years ago.)

I’m just gonna go chunk by chunk here, because. Oh man I hate it. (A pre-emptive tl;dr: katara deserved better, why is her letter of memories to her son ENTIRELY ABOUT AANG FROM BEGINNING TO END)

Copious amounts of Aang and Kataang salt ahead. You’ve been warned.