Casual Vibes with Shark!

yes i spent my entire life until a few months ago assuming green eyes were an urban legend

"what about all the fictional characters with green eyes" thought it was a trope like with anime protagonists having naturally purple hair

i found out by watching Desperate Housewives (one of the actors has green eyes and it threw me off)

(i had never watched Desperate Housewives until that point bc i assumed it was reality tv, of the same genre as Real Housewives Of Metropolitan Areas franchise)

i still haven't seen green eyes irl, i am simply aware now that they actually exist

Sun x moon

Fire x water

Natural warm x natural cold

Extrovert x introvert

Loud x quiet

Not a step parent but parent who stepped up x single dad of two kids, one who is a demon

Daddy issues x health relationship with father figure where you trust him enough to involve him with your decisions that aren't just traitorous to the organization you work for but possibly to the human race as a whole but he's so onboard with it that he agrees to go alone with a honor based suicide pack of it goes wrong

Sunshine x stormcloud

Colleagues to friends to lovers

Warm colors x cool colors

ADHD x autistic

trauma🌞🌈🍬 x trauma🦴☔😞

it isn't just that capitalism is killing fun and whimsy, it is that any element of entertainment or joy is being fed upon by this mosquito body, one that will suck you dry at any vulnerability.

do you want to meet new friends in your city? download this app, visit our website, sign up for our email list. pay for this class on making a terrarium, on candlemaking, on cooking. it will be 90 dollars a session. you can go to group fitness, but only under our specific gym membership. solve the puzzle, sign up for our puzzle-of-the-month-club. what is a club if not just a paid opportunity - you are all paying for the same thing, which makes you a community.

but you're like me, i know it - you're careful, you try the library meetings and the stuff at the local school and all of that. the problem is that you kind of want really specific opportunities that used to exist. you are so grateful for libraries and the publicly-funded things: they are, however, an exception - and everything they have, they've fought tooth-and-nail to protect. you read a headline about how in many other states, libraries have virtually nothing left.

do you want to meet up with your friends afterwards? gift your friends the discord app. you can choose to go to a cafe (buy a coffee, at least), a bar (money, alcohol) or you can all stay in and catch a movie (streaming) or you can all stay in bed (rent. don't get me started) and scream (noise complaint. ticket at least).

you want to read a new book, but the book has to have 124 buzzwords from tiktok readers that are, like, weirdly horny. you can purchase this audiobook on audible! your podcast isn't on spotify, it's on its own server, pay for a different site. fuck, at least you're supporting artists you like. the art museum just raised their ticket price. once, they had a temporary exhibit that acknowledged that ~85% of their permanent art galleries were from cis white men, and that they had thousands of works by women (even famous women, like frida! georgia o'keefe!) just rotting in their basement. that exhibit lasted for 3 months and then they put everything away again.

the walmart down the street proudly supports this strip of land by the street! here are some flowers with wilting leaves. my friend once got fined by the city because she organized a community pick-up of the riverfront, which was technically private property.

no, you cannot afford to take that dance class, neither can i. by the way - i'm a teacher. i'm absolutely not saying "educators shouldn't be paid fairly." i'm saying that when i taught classes, renting a studio went from 20 bucks an hour to 180 in the span of 6 months. no significant changes to the studio were made, except they now list the place as updated and friendly. the heat still doesn't work in the building. i have literally never seen the landlord who ignores my emails. recently they've been renting it out at night as an "unusual nightclub; a once-in-a-lifetime close-knit party." they spent some of those 180 dollars on LEDs and called it renovating. the high heels they invite in have been ruining the marley.

do you want to experience the old internet? do you want to play flash games or get back the temporary joy of club penguin? you can, you just need to pay for it. i have a weird, neurodivergent obsession with occasionally checking in to watch the downfall and NFT-ification of neopets. if i'm honest with you all - i never got into webkins, my family didn't have the money to buy me a pointless elephant. people forget that "being poor" can mean literally "if i buy you that toy, i can't afford rent."

you and i don't have time to make good food, and we don't have the budget for it. we are not gonna be able to host dinner parties, we're not made of money, kid. do you want some kind of 3rd space? a space that isn't home or work or school? you could try being online, but - what places actually exist for you? tiktok counts as social media because you see other people on it, not because they actually talk to you.

there was a local winter tradition of sledding down the hill at my school. kids would use pizza boxes and jackets and whatever worked, howling and laughing. back in september, they made a big announcement that this time, rules were changing, and everyone must pay 10 dollars to participate. when im not scared shitless, i kind of appreciate the environmental irony - it hasn't gone below 40. so much for snow & joyriding.

i saw a bulletin for a local dogwalking group and, nervous about making a good first impression, showed up early. the first guy there grimaced at me. "sorry," he said. "there's a 30-dollar buy-in fee." i thought he was joking. wait. for what? the group doesn't offer anything except friendship and people with whom to walk around the city.

my partner and i went on a walk along a trail she grew up on. it used to be a nature setting, but new development took up most of the nature. i'm sure those offices were an investment for someone

there's a mall we visited not far from that trail. i could name every shop - not one of them was local, or even different from the malls in my hometown hundreds of miles away. the only seating was in santa's lap (if you paid for a photo) or in the food court (no loitering, and don't mind the pigs standing around)

want to learn a language? use a flashcard app. it's a 3-day free trial, then you have to pay $50 to review your cards. duolingo used to be free - now you have to restart the app after every lesson to skip the ads, and there's 6 separate buttons advertising their subscription service. oh, and that fun chess game your friends were talking about has ads too

my friend who's obsessed with trains can't come visit the train museum with us. it's $20 in gas each way to drive, and train tickets go for upwards of $60. admission is $12 for adults. the sections on the rail oligarchs (and the working wife of one of them, oooo #progressive #feminisim) span multiple large rooms. the section on the immigrant workers who built the rails in their blood occupies a corner of a single room, overshadowed by the huge historic train front and center. you can buy "hobo code"-themed shirts and decor in the gift shop

The Iron Lung movie came out before the Project Hail Mary movie. Two months before, in fact.

The ship started not because people watched PHM and decided to ship Grace with this other character called Simon. But because the Iron Lung movie fans watched it and decided to ship Simon with Grace.

Spoiler alert for both movies here, but Iron Lung is a horror movie where the main character goes through it all alone and then dies at the end. PHM meanwhile ends in a more hopeful tone where the main character gets not only companionship, but a chance at a happy ending.

People who had watched the Iron Lung movie watched PHM and noticed the similarities of the unwilling suicide missions the main characters were put through.

And then went on to consider what if Simon didn't die, but rather got transported to a different world. To someone who understands what he went through. And he gets to have a happy ending.

I love the cultural research for atla and stuff but sometimes I wonder what's appreciation and what's appropriation in the series, yknow? :(

This is going to be my most liberal-arts-college-essay-ish post to date. You've been warned...

First off, I'm going to go with the Wikipedia definition of the word:

Cultural appropriation is the adoption of an element or elements of culture or identity by members of another culture or identity in a manner perceived as inappropriate or unacknowledged.

Within that broad definition, I'd like to propose two sub-types of cultural appropriation:

Social cultural appropriation

Economic cultural appropriation

While something can be both types of appropriation, the intents are different. Social cultural appropriation is when someone appropriates a culture for their own personal enjoyment. To me, this is the more subjective of the two types.

For example, in my experience, Asians in Asia generally aren't bothered by non-Asians wearing the traditional clothing. They view it as cultural appreciation, as people putting in the effort to enjoy another culture. This is a perfectly understandable and valid take.

However, Asians in Western countries will generally feel these actions are more appropriative, because we are a marginalized identity in Western nations. We're forced to reckon with not being entirely accepted by the mainstream culture (hegemony), resulting in our underrepresentation in Western media and issues facing our community being disregarded by broader society. We also have to deal with the features and culture we were born with being mocked and discriminated against by the hegemony. As such, we're going to be more attuned to the societal power imbalance at play, when a non-Asian (usually white) gets social capital for the same features or cultural markers that marginalize Asians. The implicit message is that people of Asian descent are innately devalued by Western society. These are the kind of feelings and nuances we're trying to capture when we say something feels like "cultural appropriation". And it is also valid to feel this way.

This is why I say that social cultural appropriation is subjective. Whether an act is appreciative or appropriative is determined by the person perceiving the act. In the context of ATLA, I view it as a mixture of both but also perceive it as more appreciative than appropriative. I've posted before that ATLA is very much a product of capitalizing on pop culture trends in the early-to-mid 2000s. At the same time, the amount of effort that went into depicting different Asian cultures and time periods was leagues above any other Western cartoon of the period. So, for me, the good outweighs the bad. But it's ultimately up to your personal sensibilities. And, for those wanting to engage with other cultures, all you can really do is try and read the room of who your audience is going to be. It also never hurts to cite your sources.

On the other hand, economic cultural appropriation is pretty straightforward: It's when a hegemonic institution takes the culture of a marginalized group, repackages it, and profits from it. In turn, the marginalized group receives no financial benefit from the appropriation. They may even face social pressure to disengage from the very cultural product they created, due to the cultural creation becoming intertwined with and falsely credited to the hegemonic culture. The most famous example of this would be rock and roll music, thanks to Elvis.

And, unfortunately, Avatar: The Last Airbender was very much a work of economic cultural appropriation. It was a story that was unambiguously inspired by Asian/Indigenous culture and history, yet the primary beneficiaries of the show's success were white. The institution that produced it was mostly white (Nickelodeon), the showrunners were white (Bryke), the OST composers were white, a majority of the VAs were white, and most of the writers were white.

Of course, when people ask if something is cultural appropriation, they're not simply asking for you to validate what they're observing. There's also the implied question of "Is it morally irresponsible for me to enjoy this piece of media?" To that, I would say that we can't really undo the problematic aspects of the source material. However, we can look at how the media property is being handled in the current day.

In that respect, I will give Bryke credit. In the modern day, Bryke have used this Asian/Indigenous-inspired franchise they've created to help carve out career opportunities for POC; most notably, through the casting in the Netflix adaption and the voice casting for the upcoming animated movie. Additionally, supplementary materials like the Chronicle of the Avatar novels have been authored by Asian writers and the Water Tribe costumes in the Netflix adaption were created by actual Indigenous craftspeople.

and they're just absolutely horrified because now they know why the Blip-A never returned, they sent them all to die, now to save their sun they have to redo the entire program all over again and Adrian is devastated -

Turns out my ass couldn’t draw the comic properly digitally so I just drew it on paper then coloured em’ digitally :P

MORE THREATENINGLY Raw wheat can carry E. Coli. However, if you don’t mind making your own cookie dough, you can easily make it safely.

Take your standard recipe. Omit the eggs. Eggs serve as a binding agent to hold the cookie together. Since we’re eating the dough raw, that’s not needed. Take the flour, put it in a pan and bake it at 350 for 7 minutes. Any E. Coli is now dead.