i wish you the best

There's a certain poetry to finishing this right as it's getting dark and blue outside.

Certainly!

I was loosely following a wassail recipe I found but made some substitutions, and this might be closer to a mulled cider than a true wassail, but either way it's delicious.

Ingredients:

-64 floz (~2 litres) of apple cider

-5 mid sized oranges

-1 regular or 2 small lemons

-1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg

-3 or 4 cinnamon sticks (I used three since one was chonky)

-fresh ginger root (or 1/4 tsp ground ginger)

-15 whole cloves or 1/4 teaspoon ground cloves

-1 Tablespoon of honey

Optional: your choice of rum or brandy

Preparations:

Juice four of the five oranges and your lemon(s). Slice the fifth orange and poke the whole cloves into the slices.

Thinly slice the ginger root. I ended up only using one of the two pictured, and each of those were about 4 inches long or so.

Add all of the ingredients to your cooking vessel and bring to a medium heat. You want to see a bit of bubbling in the liquid (not a rolling boil) and a froth/foam will form on top. This is fine!

Reduce to a low simmer (around a 3 out of 10) for 30-40 minutes. Stir everything in the pot in about five minute intervals.

Storage:

Hello I am crawling out of the woodwork again to explain an American political thing in too much detail.

So. Basics. What is a tariff? In short it’s a tax that people pay when they import things.

In long, imagine you want a thing. Say, a really nice baseball bat. You want to buy it from a company that makes them in, let’s say, Japan. You’d likely buy them from a store in the US that bought that baseball bat from the Japanese manufacturer.

Let’s say for simplicity’s sake that the store bought it for $50 and they charge you $100 for it. This margin is enough for the baseball supply store to pay their employees, pay their rent, buy more stock, buy some advertising, etc.

Now imagine the government decides that Americans aren’t buying enough baseball bats locally. Or perhaps they have some sort of issue with Japanese baseball. I dunno. For whatever reason though they put a 20% import tax, known as a tariff, on Japanese baseball products.

Now that store in the US in addition to paying $50 to the manufacturer in Japan is also paying $10 in tax to the US government. That baseball bat now essentially costs them $60. And since they need more money to buy stock now and they needed that markup to run their business anyways your $100 Japanese baseball bat will now cost you $120.

In an ideal world (if you like tariffs) this would cause only the targeted product to cost more while locally manufactured goods cost the same. So maybe you’d be encouraged to buy an American made baseball bat because those still only cost $100 while imported ones now cost $20 more.

In the past and in our modern day Congress, and in some circumstances where Congress has allowed it, the president have put tariffs on specific products do discourage people from importing them or buying them. For example, during the Biden administration they determined that Chinese electric cars, with their incredibly cheap cost, could become a real threat to the American automotive industry so a 100% tariff was put on Chinese made electric vehicles which made them way more expensive. This tariff has worked. People don’t really import Chinese electric vehicles and generally buy American or European ones instead.

So in short again, it’s a tax that a business pays on imported goods to discourage people from buying those goods because the business will be forced to charge their customers more to buy it in order to cover their own costs.

So what’s going on with tariffs right now?

Well, most people don’t know what tariffs are exactly. A lot of people are also rightfully pissed that the US doesn’t have a lot of good jobs right now. I mean there’s jobs, but not very good ones. Not ones that’ll give you a nice quality of life and a comfortable retirement.

During the time when there were a lot of jobs like this in the 40s-60s, the US was a manufacturing hub. After the labor movement, working in a factory could give you a stable working class job with benefits. It might not have been a high paying job, but it was enough for a family to live on one income in a small house or apartment and to have healthcare and an okay retirement.

After the 1970s however, manufacturing started moving overseas to countries where the cost of living is lower and/or they have less workers rights like in China or Vietnam. Right after this was also the era of Reagan. Deregulation of banks and the media, cutting government services, anti-union activism. This set the stage for the 2008 recession and the current economy we have now in the US where more people are contractors, there’s less unions, more service jobs, and in many cases it’s nearly impossible to have a decent living and retirement on one income.

Many people in the US, especially in areas where manufacturing used to be huge, have a cultural memory of when life was better but instead of contributing this to government policy and corporate anti-union efforts, they contribute this to the loss of manufacturing jobs.

In fact, unemployment is fairly low right now. The problem is that jobs that are available don’t pay people enough or aren’t full time. I’m technically not unemployed for example because I occasionally get contracted by disabled relatives to do chores and errands for them through a state agency that provides those services but I still make less than $400 a month doing that. I don’t need to tell you that that’s not enough to pay rent and a lot of people in this country are in similar situations.

A lot of people don’t know all that though. They think that the problem is manufacturing leaving the US for foreign countries they don’t know much about and might not have a very good opinion of.

So, enter Donald Trump. Again.

What Donald Trump has been doing is blaming other countries for our economic problems. He points out that the US imports more than it exports. Which is true, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. We don’t have every natural resource in the world. Our climate means we can’t grow certain things. Our manufacturing capacity is lower than it used to be. We produce oil but not every part of the country is in a convenient spot to get that oil to so in some regions it makes more sense to import it by sea. Also, international trade isn’t supposed to be a 1:1 exchange. It’s business. It’s an ecosystem. Not some sort of debt based system.

However, again, most people don’t know all that. So some of them hear Donald Trump say that these countries owe us for having a trade deficit. They stole our manufacturing jobs. The kind of jobs we had when living was easier. If we could bring manufacturing back to the US we could be prosperous again.

He also calls tariffs “taxing the other countries” which is just… a lie. That’s not what tariffs are. Tariffs are a tax on local businesses importing things, not foreign businesses making those things. Again though, most people don’t know this.

So the general idea with his tariffs is to bring manufacturing back to the US. Which isn’t going to happen.

Here’s the thing. Let’s return to that baseball bat. Okay, your imported baseball bat from Japan is $120 now. Will that American made baseball bat actually be cheaper? No, actually. Because we live in a globalized economy. That baseball bat factory in the US buys its wood from Canada. It buys its beeswax wood polish from a manufacturer in the UK. It buys the stamps for its logo from a factory in Vietnam and the paint used on that stamp was made in Germany. The machines themselves that they use to shape their baseball bats have parts that were made in several countries from materials imported from other countries. The manufacturer has to pay a tariff on all of those things. So, your American baseball bat also ends up costing $120.

Not to mention that we simply don’t have the manufacturing capacity that we used to and it takes years to set up the supply chains and build the facilities necessary to build things at scale.

And even with tariffs in place, it’s still cheaper to manufacture a lot of things overseas because of the low cost of living in those countries. So those jobs just aren’t coming back. Also, a lot of those jobs that used to exist have been automated. A massive large scale brewery and canning facility for example no longer requires you to have people to manually stir the vats and count things and stamp labels. You might only need three guys monitoring data on screens and a manager to run an entire factory these days because of automation.

So, Trump has started putting tariffs in place hoping it’ll bring back manufacturing (it won’t) and it’s bringing up prices which he also said he’d bring down.

Here’s the other thing though. Some manufacturing and resource mining could potentially come back to the US. Not most, but some. If these tariffs were a sure thing it would still ruin us for no reason but people could adjust to the new terrible normal over time and some investors could bring back some manufacturing and resource processing and over time a few things would get a bit less expensive.

However, these tariffs have proved to be WILDLY unpopular once people actually realized what they were. Especially since he decided to tariff Canada and Mexico which… makes no goddamn sense. They’re our neighbors, a couple of our closest friends, the countries we trade with the most, where we get a lot of our food and natural resources, and there’s a trade deal that Trump himself negotiated in his last term that says there can’t be tariffs between our three countries.

So he keeps taking them away, putting them back, putting them on pause, putting them back. Saying they’ll be 10%, saying they’ll be 20%, putting a 125% tariff on China, lowering it, raising it again. Nobody knows what the fuck is going on so why would investors put all that time and money in to setting up factories and processing plants in the US if they don’t know what tariffs might or might not be in place tomorrow?

Also. The president legally can’t do that. Congress hasn’t officially given him the authority to do that. In fact, they’ve already blocked him from putting tariffs on Canada and various people are taking him to court over it.

Also also, most economists agree that tariffs are generally a bad thing and they usually don’t work anyways unless they’re specific and targeted like the Chinese electric car thing I mentioned earlier.

So tariffs don’t bring back manufacturing jobs, they bring prices up, the way they’re being implemented is really unstable in a way that makes them hard to recover from, and Trump legally can’t be doing that anyways.

The new layout it a whole mess. Thankfully Xkit can already help with a bunch of this! I'm sure it'll give more options soon.

Vanilla Tumblr: (I have marked in red what can be removed. The tabs can be set not to stick, so you will really only see them at the top of your dash. Empty box on the left for hidden notifications and shop sparkle, i just didn't have any. I'm EU so no Live for me).

Xkit Rewritten Tumblr:

The settings I use:

August 2015

October 2016

April 2017

July 2017

September 2018

December 2018

June 2019

February 2020

August 2020

May 2021

January 2022

October 2022

April 2023

July 2023

June 2024

February 2025

March 2025

November 2025

August 2026

tim nods, pushing his salad around. “it’s kind of annoying.” he’s gone vegan ever since he could talk to animals. his cheeks are sallow. “yesterday i absorbed static and i can’t stop shocking myself.”

“you don’t know what from,” shay is detangling her hair at the table, even though it’s not polite. about a second ago, her hair was perfect, which implies she’s been somewhere in the inbetween. “try millions of multiverses that your powers conflict with.” 

“did we die in the last one?” you grin and she grins and tim grins but nobody answers the question.

now she has a cut over her left eye and her hair is shorter. she looks tired and tim looks tired and you look down at your 18-year-old hands, which are nothing. 

they ship out tomorrow. they go out to the frontlines or wherever it is that superheroes go to fight supervillains; the cream of the crop. the starlight banner kids. 

“you both are trying too hard,” you tell them, “couldn’t you have been, like, really good at surfing?”

“god,” shay groans, “what i’d give to only be in the olympics.”

xxx in the night, tim is asleep. on the way home, he absorbed telekinesis, and hates it too. 

shay looks at you. “i’m scared,” she says.

you must not have died recently, because she looks the same she did at dinner, cut healing slowly over her eye the way it’s supposed to, not the hyper-quickness of a timejump. just shay, living in the moment when the moment is something everyone lives in. her eyes are wide and dark the way brown eyes can be, that swelling fullness that feels so familiar and warm, that piercing darkness that feels like a stone at the back of your tongue.

“you should be,” you say.

her nose wrinkles, she opens her mouth, but you plow on.

“they’re going to take one look at you and be like, ‘gross, shay? no thanks. you’re too pretty. it’s bringing down like, morale, and things’. then they’ll kick you out and i’ll live with you in a box and we’ll sell stolen cans of ravioli.”

she’s grinning. “like chef boyardee or like store brand?”

“store brand but we print out chef boyardee labels and tape them over the can so we can mark up the price.”

“where do we get the tape?” 

“we, uh,” you look into those endless dark eyes, so much like the night, so much like a good hot chocolate, so much like every sleepover you’ve had with the two of your best friends, and you say, “it’s actually just your hair. i tie your hair around the cans to keep the label on.”

she throws a pillow at you. 

you both spend a night planning what you’ll do in the morning when shay is kicked out of Squadron 8, Division 1; top rankers that are all young. you’ll both run away to the beach and tim will be your intel and you’ll burn down the whole thing. you’re both going to open a bakery where you will do the baking and she’ll use her time abilities to just, like, speed things up so you don’t have to wake up at dawn. you’re both going to become wedding planners that only do really extreme weddings.

she falls asleep on your shoulder. you do not sleep at all.

in the morning, they are gone.

xxx

squadron 434678, Division 23467 is basically “civilian status.” you still have to know what to expect and all that stuff. you’re glad that you’re taking extra classes at college; you’re kind of bored re-learning the stuff you were already taught in high school. there are a lot of people who need help, and you’re good at that, so you help them. 

tim and shay check in from time to time, but they’re busy saving the world, so you don’t fault them for it. in the meantime, you put your head down and work, and when your work is done, you help the people who can’t finish their work. and it kind of feels good. kind of.

xxx

at twenty, squadron 340067, division 2346 feels like a good fit. tim and you go out for ice cream in a new place that rebuilt after the Phoenix group burned it down. you’ve chosen nurse-practitioner as your civilian job, because it seems to fit, but you’re not released for full status as civilian until you’re thirty, so it’s been a lot of office work.

tim’s been on the fritz a lot lately, overloading. you’re worried they’ll try to force him out on the field. he’s so young to be like this.

“i feel,” he says, “like it all comes down to this puzzle. like i’m never my own. i steal from other people’s boxes.”

you wrap your hand around his. “sometimes,” you say, “we love a river because it is a reflection.”

he’s quiet a long time after that. a spurt of flame licks from under his eyes.

“i wish,” he says, “i could believe that.”

xxx

twenty three has you in squad 4637, division 18. really you’ve just gotten here because you’re good at making connections. you know someone who knows someone who knows you as a good kid. you helped a woman onto a bus and she told her neighbor who told his friend. you’re mostly in the filing department, but you like watching the real superheroes come in, get to know some of them. at this level, people have good powers but not dangerous ones. you learn how to help an 18 year old who is a loaded weapon by shifting him into a non-violent front. you get those with pstd home where they belong. you put your head down and work, which is what you’re good at. 

long nights and long days and no vacations is fine until everyone is out of the office for candlenights eve. you’re the only one who didn’t mind staying, just in case someone showed up needing something. 

the door blows open. when you look up, he’s bleeding. you jump to your feet. 

“oh,” you say, because you recognize the burning bird insignia on his chest, “I think you have the wrong office.”

“i just need,” he spits onto the ground, sways, collapses. 

well, okay. so, that’s, not, like. great. “uh,” you say, and you miss shay desperately, “okay.”

you find the source of the bleeding, stabilize him for when the shock sets in, get him set up on a desk, sew him shut. two hours later, you’ve gotten him a candlenights present and stabilized his vitals. you’ve also filed him into a separate folder (it’s good to be organized) and found him a home, far from the warfront.

when he wakes up, you give him hot chocolate (god, how you miss shay), and he doesn’t smile. he doesn’t smile at the gift you’ve gotten him (a better bulletproof vest, one without the Phoenix on it), or the stitches. that’s okay. you tell him to take the right medications, hand them over to him, suggest a doctor’s input. and then you hand over his folder with a new identity in it and a new house and civilian status. you take a deep breath. 

he opens it and bursts into tears. he doesn’t say anything. he just leaves and you have to clean up the blood, which isn’t very nice of him. but it’s candlenights. so whatever. hopefully he’ll learn to like his gift.

xxx

squadron 3046, division 2356 is incredibly high for a person like you to fit. but still, you fit, because you’re good at organization and at hard work, and at knowing how to hold on when other people don’t see a handhold.

shay is home. you’re still close, the two of you, even though she feels like she exists on another planet. the more security you’re privy to, the more she can tell you. 

you brush her hair as she speaks about the endless man who never dies, and how they had to split him up and hide him throughout the planet. she cries when she talks about how much pain he must be in.

“can you imagine?” she whispers, “i mean, i know he’s phoenix, but can you imagine?” 

“one time i had to work retail on black friday,” you say.

she sniffles.

“one time my boss put his butt directly on my hand by accident and i couldn’t say anything so i spent a whole meeting with my hand directly up his ass,” you say.

her eyes are so brown, and filling, and there are scars on her you’ve never noticed that might be new or very, very, very old; and neither of you know exactly how much time she’s actually been alive for. 

“i mean,” you say, “yeah that might hurt but one time i said goodbye to someone but they were walking in the same direction. i mean can you imagine.”

she laughs, finally, even though it’s weakly, and says, “one time even though i can manipulate time i slept in and forgot to go to work even though i was leading a presentation and i had to look them in the face later to tell them that.”

“you’re a compete animal,” you tell her, and look into those eyes, so sad and full of timelines you’ll never witness, “you should be kicked out completely.”

she wipes her face. “find me in a box,” she croaks, “selling discount ravioli.”

xxx

you don’t know how it happens. but you guess the word gets around. you don’t think you like being known to them as someone they can go to, but it’s not like they’ve got a lot of options. many of them just want to be out of it, so you get them out, you guess.

you explain to them multiple times you haven’t done a residency yet and you really only know what an emt would, but they still swing by. every time they show up at your office, you feel your heart in your chest: this is it, this is how you die, this is how it ends. 

“so, like, this group” you say, trying to work the system’s loopholes to find her a way out of it, “from ashes come all things, or whatever?”

she shrugs. you can tell by looking at her that she’s dangerous. “it’s corny,” she says. another shrug. “i didn’t mean to wind up a criminal.”

you don’t tell her that you sort of don’t know how one accidentally becomes a criminal, since you kind-of-sort-of help criminals out, accidentally. 

“i don’t believe any of that stuff,” she tells you, “none of that whole… burn it down to start it over.” she swallows. “stuff just happens. and happens. and you wake up and it’s still happening, even though you wish it wasn’t.”

you think about shay, and how she’s covered in scars, and her crying late at night because of things nobody else ever saw.

“yeah,” you say, and print out a form, “i get that.”

and you find a dangerous woman a normal home.

xxx

“you’re squadron 905?” 

“division 34754,” you tell him. watch him look down at your ID and certification and read your superpower on the card and then look back up to you and then back down to the card and then back up at you, and so on. he licks his chapped lips and stands in the cold.

this happens a lot. but you smile. the gatekeeper is frowning, but then hanson walks by. “oh shit,” he says, “it’s you! come right on in!” he gives you a hug through your rolled-down window.

the gatekeeper is in a stiff salute now. gulping in terror. hanson is one of the strongest people in this sector, and he just hugged you.

the gate opens. hanson swaggers through. you shrug to the gatekeeper. “i helped him out one time.” 

inside they’re debriefing. someone has shifted sides, someone powerful, someone wild. it’s not something you’re allowed to know about, but you know it’s bad. so you put your head down, and you work, because that’s what you’re good at, after all. you find out the gatekeeper’s name and send him a thank-you card and also handmade chapstick and some good earmuffs.

shay messages you that night. i have to go somewhere, she says, i can’t explain it, but there’s a mission and i might be gone a long time.

you stare at the screen for a long time. your fingers type out three words. you erase them. you instead write where could possibly better than stealing chef boyardee with me?

she doesn’t read it. you close the tab. 

and you put your head down. and work.

xxx

it’s in a chili’s. like, you don’t even like chili’s? chili’s sucks, but the boss ordered it so you’re here to pick it up, wondering if he gave you enough money to cover. things have been bad recently. thousands dying. whoever switched sides is too powerful to stop. they destroy anyone and anything, no matter the cost.

the phoenix fire smells like pistachios, you realize. you feel at once part of yourself and very far. it happens so quickly, but you feel it slowly. you wonder if shay is involved, but know she is not.

the doors burst in. there’s screaming. those in the area try their powers to defend themselves, but everyone is civilian division. the smell of pistachios is cloying. 

then they see you. and you see them. and you put your hands on your hips.

“excuse me, tris,” you say, “what are you doing?”

there’s tears in her eyes. “i need the money,” she croaks.

“From a chili’s?” you want to know, “who in their right mind robs a chili’s? what are you going to do, steal their mozzarella sticks?”

“it’s connected to a bank on the east wall,” she explains, “but i thought it was stupid too.”

you shake your head. you pull out your personal checkbook. you ask her how much she needs, and you see her crying. you promise her the rest when you get your paycheck.

someone bursts into the room. shouts things. demands they start killing. 

but you’re standing in the way, and none of them will kill you or hurt you, because they all know you, and you helped them at some point or another, or helped their friend, or helped their children.

tris takes the money, everyone leaves. by the time the heroes show up, you’ve gotten everyone out of the building.

the next time you see tris, she’s marrying a beautiful woman, and living happily, having sent her cancer running. you’re a bridesmaid at the wedding.

xxx

“you just,” the director wants to know now, “sent them running?” 

hanson stands between her and you, although you don’t need the protection.

“no,” you say again, for the millionth time, “i just gave her the money she needed and told her to stop it.”

“the phoenix group,” the director of squadron 300 has a vein showing, “does not just stop it.”

you don’t mention the social issues which confound to make criminal activity a necessity for some people, or how certain stereotypes forced people into negative roles to begin with, or how an uneven balance of power punished those with any neurodivergence. instead you say, “yeah, they do.”

“i’m telling you,” hanson says, “we brought her out a few times. it happens every time. they won’t hurt her. we need her on our team.”

your spine is stiff. “i don’t do well as a weapon,” you say, voice low, knowing these two people could obliterate you if they wished. but you won’t use people’s trust against them, not for anything. besides, it’s not like trust is your superpower. you’re just a normal person.

hanson snorts. “no,” he says, “but i like that when you show up, the fighting just… stops. that’s pretty nice, kid.”

“do you know… what we are dealing with…. since agent 25… shifted….?” the director’s voice is thin.

“yeah,” hanson says, “that’s why i think she’d be useful, you know? add some peace to things.”

the director sits down. sighs. waves her hand. “whatever,” she croaks, “do what you want. reassign her.”

hanson leads you out. over your shoulder, you see her put her head in her hands. later, you get her a homemade spa kit, and make sure to help her out by making her a real dinner from time to time, something she’s too busy for, mostly.

at night, you write shay messages you don’t send. telling her things you cannot manage.

one morning you wake up to a terrible message: shay is gone. never to be seen again.

xxx

you’re eating ice cream when you find him.

behind you, the city is burning. hundreds dead, if not thousands.

he’s staring at the river. maybe half-crying. it’s hard to tell, his body is shifting, seemingly caught between all things and being nothing.

“ooh buddy,” you say, passing him a cone-in-a-cup, the way he likes it, “talk about a night on the town.”

the bench is burning beside him, so you put your jacket down and snuff it out. it’s hard sitting next to him. he emits so much.

“hey tim?” you say. 

“yeah?” his voice is a million voices, a million powers, a terrible curse. 

“can i help?” you ask.

he eats a spoonful of ice cream. 

“yeah,” he says eventually. “i think i give up.”

xxx

later, when they praise you for defeating him, you won’t smile. they try to put you in the media; an all-time hero. you decline every interview and press conference. you attend his funeral with a veil over your head.

the box goes into the ground. you can’t stop crying.

you’re the only one left at the site. it’s dark now, the subtle night.

you feel her at your side and something in your heart stops hurting. a healing you didn’t know you needed. her hands find yours.

“they wanted me to kill him,” she says, “they thought i’d be the only one who could.” her hands are warm. you aren’t breathing.

“beat you to it,” you say. 

“i see that,” she tells you. 

you both stand there. crickets nestle the silence.

“you know,” she says eventually, “i have no idea which side is the good one.”

“i think that’s the point of a good metaphor about power and control,” you say, “it reflects the human spirit. no tool or talent is good or bad.”

“just useful,” she whispers. after a long time, she wonders, “so what does that make us?”

xxx

it’s a long trek up into the mountains. shay seems better every day. more solid. less like she’s on another plane.

“heard you’re a top ten,” she tells me, her breath coming out in a fog. you’ve reclassed her to civilian. it took calling in a few favors, but you’ve got a lot. 

“yeah,” you say, “invulnerable.”

“oh, is that your superpower?” she laughs. she knows it’s not.

“that’s what they’re calling it,” you tell her, out of breath the way she is not, “it’s how they explain a person like me at the top.”

“if that means ‘nobody wants to kill me’, i think i’m the opposite.” but she’s laughing, in a light way, a way that’s been missing from her.

the cabin is around the corner. the lights are already on. 

“somebody’s home,” i grin.

tim, just tim, tim who isn’t forced into war and a million reflections, opens the door. “come on in.” xxx squadron one, division three. a picture of shay in a wedding dress is on my desk. she looks radiant, even though she’s marrying little old me.

[image: tweet by thefourthvine, transcribed below:]

Extremely concerned that the response to #DraculaDaily on my timeline:

Non-lawyers: Jonathan, RUN

so three things happen the summer after ozai is defeated and appa starts shedding in earnest again

aang starts spinning and selling yarn because that’s What You Do and he’s clinging REAL HARD to every possible air nomad tradition because, well, who else will remember these things?

toph hears about this and scruffs him before he can sell too much because she’s a merchants daughter and holy shit aang do you understand what you’re selling?? yarn from the last known sky bison! the avatar’s own spirit guide!! spun by the avatars own hand!!!! what are you doing aang!!!!!! she has to drag katara in at this point because aang is real unhappy with the idea that his normal flying bison yarn of, uh, questionable quality is being sold to exclusive high class weavers so they can make shawls for filthy rich nobles for baaaaaank just on the basis of his name. this isn’t how the monks did it :/ and he doesn’t WANT a lot of money anyway! he’s a monk!! he only asks for what he needs to survive!! anyway katara manages to talk toph around to donating most of the money to reconstruction efforts, charities, and orphanages and convinces aang that having an emergency fund is a good thing and he should keep something. aang accidentally ends up with a reasonably full bank account and is really confused about how that happened, why it’s there, and what he’s supposed to do with it

there is a real weird period of time where it’s In Fashion for high noble ladies to have shawls and scarves dyed the same color as aangs clothes (because that’s how you know it’s made with special avatar yarn!) or have images of appa woven into them (can you imagine a shawl that’s just a full length body shot of appa?? amazing) and all the earth kingdom nobility are just rocking green and orange like nbd. weaving decorative shawls with slubby yarn becomes really in fashion, too, because aang is not great at spinning. he’s 13 and it’s boring, ok?

BONUS sokka is just. so mad. you could have been making bank with appa the whole time we were scrambling around the planet aang? do you realize how much more food we could have had? how many more hot baths?? how could you betray me like this

i bet sky bison yarn is really strong but probably not super soft - we see in the show that the fibers are really long, which lends itself well to strong yarns that can stand up to a lot of wear and tear (silk yarn is INCREDIBLE when it comes to being hard-wearing, and that’s mostly because silk is basically an INFINITELY LONG FIBER). But because it’s so long and comes from such a large animal, it’s probably really coarse and thick.

I’m imagining most of those high-class ladies would be wearing at least one layer underneath their shawls, because bison yarn is probably pretty itchy if you’re used to high quality wool, silk, or fine linen. Especially bison yarn spun by a 13yo who doesn’t really like spinning.

unless of course the air nomads bred their bison specifically for soft fur, but generally when you’re breeding for stuff like that, you need different breeds for different purposes. appa’s pretty clearly a long-distance riding bison, which would probably have been a different breed than whichever ones would have been bred for soft fur. most species of domesticated animal that are dual+ purpose (i.e. meat/milk/wool/transportation) have breeds that can only do one or two of those well, and the others not as great.

the air nomads obviously would not have been breeding for meat, because vegetarians. For long distance travel and a nomadic lifestyle I bet they would have wanted a travel/milk dual purpose breed, but because they can regulate their body temperature with airbending, soft warm yarn might not have been a high priority for that breed.

I *do* spin on a drop spindle, tho, and the biggest problem with stopping and starting often is keeping the single the same width, but you have the same problem stopping and starting ANY kind of spinning project. In some ways, a drop spindle makes it easier to control that than a regular spinning wheel - you have a lot more control over the fiber and the yarn you’re spinning, so you can be more precise. My drop spindle yarns tend to be very regular and compact, while my spinning wheel yarns are more varied and lofty.

And wouldn’t the process from start to finish be a good lesson in great fullness? Like how long it takes from baby bison to clothes

Also, to the person who said Sky Bisons would only shed about seven pounds a year, I would like to counter that idea with the fact that Appa is GARGANTUAN. He has enough room on his saddle to carry literally six or seven children and their equipment on his back without much complaint, of which these children are not too much smaller than adults. An ox or an Alpaca or a normal Bison are tiny compared to Appa.

I was actually trying to say that if muskox shed seven pounds we could use that to extrapolate how much appa shed if he shed proportionate to his size, not that appa would only shed seven pounds

ok, adhd rabbit hole time because I just looked up the average size of muskoxen and the approximate size of appa and, uh. apparently muskoxen are 900lbs full grown and appa is ten tons. over TWENTY TIMES THE SIZE OF A MUSKOX. obvs that’s doesn’t actually tell us anything about appas actual height and length but that’s the only solid number the show gives us and thirty pounds of underfur is starting to seem pretty conservative. it might be closer to 120lbs???

you’re in the pocket of Big Ball, I see

there’s no pocket for me to BE in, there’s no LOBBYING involved, there’s no SUPPRESSION campaign because you don’t need one! traditional methods suppress themselves when you make modern pokéballs available. you might as well start accusing AT&T of deliberately suppressing the noble traditional art form of the goddamn semaphore.

not to mention OP demonstrates a total lack of understanding of the market realities of the pokéball industry- Silph and Devon are not monopolies, if they weren’t in constant competition their magic monster domination spheres wouldn’t cost two bucks a pop. the ball spec is a public standard, and Bill Masaki’s storage system based on that standard is an open-source project. they’re only the two largest players because they’re able to leverage economies of scale. you still get smaller operations like the Laverre City Poké Ball Factory, with better regional supply chains and local brand recognition, making room for themselves in the market. 

That notion was, and remains, a tool to limit general access to Pokémon in the interest of maintaining class disparities. I mean, have we already forgotten the Aether Foundation’s pseudo-conservationist nonsense? Their attempt to manipulate natural resources and establish a power base in Alola, while they were modernizing and taking their place on the world stage, was founded on this exact rhetoric of “rescuing” Pokémon from local disenfranchised populations, as if taking Pokémon away from places like Po Town would improve things instead of increasing competition between trainers and decreasing safety.

The release of the $2 pokeball meant that the balance of power shifted to the common citizens. If any child can wield the power of a god, the military and the government and the wealthiest businessmen have no power over them.

More than that, instead of power being determined by the wealth to acquire pokemon, power comes exclusively from the dedication, effort, and empathy required to train them to high levels and to maintain their loyalty. If a person simply buys their pokemon, then those pokemon will either stay at low levels forever, or refuse to obey the human because there is no respect between them; the most powerful people in the world are those who caught a critter at level 2-5 and then devoted their life to raising it into a world power.

This was shared on a Covid survivor group…have heard many of these before but it seems helpful: HOW TO FIGHT COVID AT HOME when you are not hospitalized.

“When the nurse came in to discharge me, I asked her, What can I do to help fight this at home? She said:

1. Sleep on your stomach at all times with Covid. If you can’t sleep on your stomach because of heath issues sleep on your side. Do not lie on your back no matter what because it smashes your lungs and that will allow fluid to set in.

2. Set your clock every two hours while sleeping on your stomach, then get out of bed and walk for 15-30 min, no matter how tired or weak that you are. Also move your arms around frequently, it helps to open your lungs. Breathe in thru your nose, and out thru your mouth. This will help build up your lungs, plus help get rid of the Pneumonia or other fluid you may have.

2. When sitting in a recliner, sit up straight - do not lie back in the recliner, again this will smash your lungs. 

3. While watching TV - get up and walk during every commercial.

4. Eat at least 1 - 2 eggs a day, plus bananas, avocado and asparagus. These are good for Potassium. 

5. Do not drink anything cold -  have it at room temperature or warm it up. Drink Pedialyte, Gatorade Zero, Powerade Zero & Water with Electrolytes to prevent you from becoming dehydrated. Water with lemon, and little honey, peppermint tea, apple cider are good suggestions for getting in fluids. No milk products, or pork. (as a singer I know milk products produce phlegm and always advised my students to have none for 3 days before a performance)

6. Vitamins D3, C, B, Zinc, Probiotic One-Day are good ideas. Tylenol for fever. Mucinex, or Mucinex DM for drainage, plus helps the cough. Pepcid helps for cramps in your legs. One baby aspirin everyday can help prevent getting a blood clot, which can occur from low activity. 

7. Drink a smoothie of blueberries, strawberries, bananas, honey, tea and a spoon or two of peanut butter. 

We always hear of how Covid takes lives, but there isn’t a lot of information out there regarding how to fight Covid when you are not critical. I hope this helps you or someone you know, just as it has helped me.”

(Wow, @thetimetostrikeislater  wish you’d had this info when you were ill)

This could be the most important post I’ve ever shared. Please Share it with anyone who is or might be going through this terrible disease.