Green Great Dragons

maomoa is painfully aware of hierarchy and power dynamics and she allows them to restrict her feelings and actions even in circumstances where it's clear an exception is being made for her

lakan ignores them entirely. he marries an old syphilis ridden courtesan and boasts about it, he's so in love with her and proud of her and he doesn't care what others think or what they say about it. he claims maomao as his despite her being a child had out of wedlock with a courtesan without his knowledge. he respects and cares for luomen despite his status as both a eunuch and criminal and shows him deference. he loses his temper with jinshi despite knowing exactly what his status is and what he could do to them - it's his son that pulls him back be reminding him of the consequences he'll face, because he knows his father can't be reigned in by consequences to himself since he just doesn't give a shit about things like that

maomao wants to be detached and logical and stay out of things that don't concern her, but she cares too much and will get herself in trouble, over and over, instead of staying out of it

lakan is detached and logical. he cares deeply for those people that are important to him and is a loyal subject of the emperor, but he has no problems letting pieces fall around him if it doesn't serve his best interests to interfere. in ways this callousness makes him a worse person, but maomao strives to be able to interact with the world that way and consistently fails to do so

maomao is unable to be honest about her feelings with others and many times refuses to even acknowledge them herself

lakan is completely unabashed with his feelings. he never hid his love for fengxian despite their stations. he's clear about his feelings for maomao, to the point that many in the palace are aware she's his daughter, and speaks proudly of this family that others would hide away. he shows deference to luomen, a form of affection in obedience from younger generation to older despite their stations no longer requiring him to do so. he's physically affectionate towards and admires lahan. he's sweet to meimei and she's fond of him in return, to the point that not only had maomao wanted him to buy her, but meimei had been willing to be bought by him, despite rejecting the idea of being bought by others. he doesn't bother to hide his positive feelings at all and barely bothers to restrain the negative ones, and only if there's something in it for him

maomao fears being wrong and the consequences it could have and has been taught by luomen to never speak about something she's not sure about. she eventually becomes comfortable enough with jinshi and others in the rear palace to voice things she's not totally sure of, but it's a constant struggle for her and she's always aware of what could happen if she's wrong

lakan trusts himself. he's very intelligent and calculating, but he doesn't have the same evidence seeking, logical mind that his uncle and daughter have and he doesn't try to. he just has exceptionally good instincts and uses them to devastating effect. he didn't have any of the same clues maomao did regarding the ritual being sabotaged, but he was there because he had a gut instinct that something was going to go wrong. lakan doesn't need overwhelming evidence to make a call or decide on a course of action, he just trusts himself

i think this is the thing that maomoa hates most of all

she doesn't trust herself at all. luomen doesn't either, and despite maomao's clear admiration, it's likely luomen's refusal to speak on something without irrefutable evidence is what caused him to be thrown out of the rear palace. i find it highly unlikely that he wouldn't have noticed that jinshi and the late emperor's second son were switched, but he might have lacked concrete evidence, and conjecture shouldn't be spoken out loud. yet despite having this philosophy and instilling it within maomao, luomen trusts lakan's instincts

the only thing even slightly critical maomao thinks about her father is her disdain for the fact he has nothing bad to say about lakan. despite lakan operating in a manner completely different than him, on an entirely different set of rules, luomen admires his abilities as a strategist without reservation

maomao craves that same admiration from luomen. she wants to be able to give in to her feelings for jinshi without worrying about the status between them. she wants to be able to articulate her feelings at all. she wants to be able to hold back from making risky calls when her emotions get the better of her. she wants, in the simplest and completest of terms, to be able to trust herself

and she can't

but lakan trusts himself easily, completely, and never back down from it

it infuriates her

mid 2026 pacific rim rewatch: grace would be the third member of the k-sci division and he and newton would have the biggest interpersonal academic beef in the history of xenobiology. they want to strangle each other every day. newton calls him "teach" to piss him off. "heyhey he's the microbiologist, I'm the macrobiologist. you know. size matters?" before the breach newton was the scholar grace called a staggering waste of carbon at the UNESCO conference in denmark.

One of my more esoteric job duties is Keeper Of The Org Chart, because I know how to bend Visio to my will. When I initially built it, the HR officer wanted one chart for each department, which I did, but then just to show off I tacked onto the end a single larger sheet that had the whole organization on it, charted out by function and direct report. For the last three years that’s been fine, since really HR and myself are the only ones who use it.  

But we have new board members cycling on now, and they want to see it, which means the CFO has to approve it, and he would like to Make Some Changes. He wants the full chart – which, remember, I didn’t have to do, I just did it for fun – to be reworked so that it shows seniority. He would like all the VPs at the top, their reports below them on levels based on who outranks whom, etc. 

Which…would be fine, but the way we’re structured, that will absolutely make the chart too big to fit on a single sheet of 11x17 paper or be readable on a single computer screen, and also snarl the reporting lines badly enough to make the thing essentially unreadable. It’s not impossible to do, but I had to inform him that if we want to do this, he needs to be like, physically sitting in the chair next to me telling me where everyone goes, because that is also VERY MUCH outside my pay grade. (I suggested instead we just add a note on the sheet that says “positioning on the chart does not indicate seniority.”) 

I foresee a lot of emails and meetings in my future, depending on what he decides. This is the kind of thing that tears families apart! 

When I got the feedback, I made the changes I could and gently pushed back on the rest. I assumed he’d seen the email when he sent the meeting request and I was thinking I was about to get scolded for pushing back. But no, he hadn’t even seen the email, he was just super stoked to talk about it.

Fortunately I had prepared – I did a mockup of what the chart would look like with the changes, and he agreed it looked less legible. So the departmental trees remain intact and indeed have been clarified, and the massive full-org tree will remain as-is with a disclaimer added.

And then we spent the rest of the meeting nattering about how it’s rough to be an artist working in finance (he’s a musician with an accounting degree, I have two arts degrees and was deeply unqualified to manage tens of thousands of dollars for my previous employer but did it anyway). I think what he wanted more than anything was someone to listen sympathetically for ten minutes. 

Critical Role (2015-) campaign 1, episode 35//campaign 2, episode 72 bonus:

Before I could even process that, another officer dropped the big surprise: they’d actually been tracking me around town for days via Flock cameras. But they kept losing the trail, so when a camera alerted them that the Range Rover had been spotted turning into Kohl’s that morning, they quickly set up their ambush and waited for me and my wife to walk out of the store and get into the SUV.

[…]

One of the officers pulled out his phone, opened the Flock app, and showed me two photos: a wide shot of the Range Rover going through the intersection and a zoomed-in shot of the New Jersey license plate, which clearly reads 34 10 DTM and says VEHICLE MFR along the bottom. Critically, the number 10 is in a much smaller font than the rest of the tag, which is the non-standard structure New Jersey uses for manufacturer plates.

[…]

The New Jersey plates that were allegedly stolen from the LA dealer were 34 03 DTM, not 34 10 DTM. But when the police report was created and the plate was entered into Flock’s system, it was just recorded as 34 DTM. Just the five large characters, no little number in the middle. And Flock’s AI tech wasn’t registering that non-standard little number when it began picking up the Range Rover around town. It just saw 34 DTM in large type and started alerting the local police.

As we all stood there shaking our heads, including my wife, who was finally allowed to join me, I connected the final dot. A lot of vehicles in JLR’s media fleet have a New Jersey manufacturer plate with the same alphanumeric structure—34 ## DTM—and Officer Ganshyn observed that meant it was now a nationwide issue. Anywhere a police department has a partnership with Flock, any other JLR-owned car with the same plate structure is going to get flagged as stolen. In fact, four other 34 ## DTM cars were being tracked around Minnesota that week, according to Officer Ganshyn. I was just the first one to get nabbed. The only way to stop it would be for the LAPD to correct their initial report and update Flock’s system, which Jaguar Land Rover was now racing to make happen following the phone call.

Still, he warned me to drive straight home, park the Range Rover, and leave it there. If I were to cross into the neighboring town, I’d probably get flagged again and go through this entire ordeal again with a different set of officers. His parting words were ominous: “You’re lucky we’re in Plymouth. If you were in Minneapolis, they definitely would’ve come at you with guns drawn.”