To The O'Sheamobile

But I was thinking just now...

Literally no one in the friend group aside from Aang knows Zuko was the Blue Spirit

So do you think... they're just hanging out in the palace post canon all piled up in one of the rooms reserved for when the royal family wants to chill—and Zuko is voicing his (extremely reasonable) upset about his father for one reason or another

And Sokka just says something like, "So are you gonna just leave him to rot in jail for the rest of his life, or are you gonna give him another punishment?"

And Zuko goes quiet. Thinking. Then he says, "Maybe I should send him on a quest to capture the Blue Spirit to regain his honor"

And then I went to the USAmerican Midwest

Rains frequently, but the worst is like standing under a bathroom shower. Genuinely inhospitable rainstorms are uncommon.

Along the coast, it's pretty easy in most areas to walk to at least one store, or else there's usually a bus or shuttle available. There are sidewalks and bike lanes everywhere.

It's a temperate boreal rainforest, so while there are many freshwater lakes and rivers, they're usually pretty cold. The biggest danger is typically getting caught in a strong current, and the most dangerous animals in swimming distance are on land.

Earthquakes happen almost every day, but the vast majority go unnoticed. Buildings are designed to withstand bigger seismic activity, so unless it's a 5 or higher it just kind of feels like having low blood sugar for a second. There are no tornados

Rural Illinois, USA:

One minute it's sunny, then ten minutes later that distant smudge on the horizon has swallowed the entire sky in black clouds and the water is coming down like waterfall and you literally CANNOT SEE. Then there's a crash like cymbals and you need to get indoors because the thunder and lightening are on TOP of you

No sidewalks until you are in the smack dab center of town, which is a three hour walk or twenty minute drive from wherever you are.

There aren't many natural bodies of water other than small ponds and creeks, and because the environment is so much warmer, those are filled with snapping turtles that can grow bigger than a nine year old child and water snakes that are incredibly venomous. These are paired with leeches and mosquitos for that sweet umami flavor.

I nod, setting down my chalk and spellbook. “It does sound like there might have been a bit of a misunderstanding.”

“She took against me, that's what happened,” the dead girl says with a scowl. She looks about fourteen, round faced and spotty, with whisps of brown hair peaking out from under her mob-cap. Her face and her crossed arms have a tell-tale bluish tinge to them. A cholera death.

“I been here for don't know how long and never gave any trouble. Nobody ever complained about me 'till her.”

…well, that's not strictly true.

Number 12, Barclay Street has been attracting rumours of haunting since the mid nineteenth century.

Sounds of faint singing and crying in the corridors at night. Cold spots. Doors that open and close by themselves. Animals acting strangely. Harmless, mid to low-level stuff, typical for a bored teenage poltergeist.

Still, pointing that out isn't likely to achieve much, and certainly the most recent complaints of blood running down the walls, screams in the dark and paralysing night terrors seem distinctly out of character.

The ghost toes the chalk again, more tentatively this time. It stays resolutely unbroken.

She could get out if she wanted to. I'm not one of those assholes who brings out their full arsenal of wards and sigils for a first meeting with a level 2 spectre. The summoning circle will keep her in one place for as long as I need her to talk, but it wouldn't hold for a moment if she really fought against it.

I take it as a good sign that she's still here. Pouting or not, she's clearly willing to work with me.

“None of the others could do this,” she says. “None of 'em even saw me.” She looks up. “Are you here to exise me?”

“Exorcise,” I say instinctively, and curse myself when she flinches. “Sorry, no, no! I don't exorcise people from their homes without good reason, not if they're happy where they are.”

“I was happy. Till she started calling in all them ghost hunters.”

Mrs Delaney had been quite persistent in her attempts to 'fix' her haunted house. Most of the people she found were charlatans, of course, but I'd still arranged an appointment as fast as I could once word reached me. It wouldn't have been long before she happened upon somebody with Talent, and unfortunately not everybody in this field knows how to behave like a professional.

“I think we might be able to help each other,” I say, careful to keep my voice calm and level.

“Don't see how. Not unless you can exorcise Her.”

“Not quite what I had in mind.” I pull out my phone and scroll through my photos. “You say that you're not the cause of the most recent incidents of paranormal activity?”

A pause. The ghost gnaws on her lip. I wait, patiently, keeping my body language open and nonthreatening. “I… I knocked her coffee cup over,” she admits at last. “She was being mean and talking on her telephone, saying I done all these things when I never did! So I decided to show her what I could do if I wanted.”

“Hmm.” The ghost eyes me nervously, as if expecting me to pull out a book, bell and candle and banish her on the spot.

“I only tipped it,” she adds. “I didn't break it or nothing!”

“You shouldn't have touched it at all,” I say sternly. “But… I can appreciate that you were frustrated, so let's say no more about it.”

The ghost looks relieved.

“My point is,” I continue, “if you weren't the one making blood rain from the ceiling or tormenting people in their sleep, then what was? There's no other ghosts on the property.” I find the picture I was looking for. “You can get anywhere around the house, right? Including behind the furniture and in the backs of cupboards?”

“Yes'm.”

I hold the phone up so that she can see the picture on the screen. “I'm going to let you go free in a moment, and I need you to see if you can find anything that looks like this.”

The ghost wrinkles her forehead. “What's that when it's at home?”

I'll add smth here cos I learned after posting this on IG that people still aren't entirely understanding how scary and dangerous this is. Ppl kept saying to me 'I can still buy your book in shops though' or 'Its okay, I'll order your book into my library!'

I dont give af about my book lol No one outside of Ace ppl ever read it, its yearly sales don't even cover a month of expenses for me.

The thing you should all be concerned about is that a totally benign unheard of book about someone's every day life is being banned. And those laws listed above are passing through US government right now. One of those laws would make it so that any teacher/librarian in the US could lose their job/go to prison for simply sharing 'ideology'- and I don't mean only lgbtq folk, these laws are attacking black history, civil rights history, disability rep in books. Just talking about these things will now legally be considered a 'dangerous ideology'.

And once that's set into law, the US government has backing via law to go ahead and say 'if these books aren't legally allowed in schools, then they shouldn't be allowed in shops, either.' And from there it sets up a great argument for 'The dangerous content in these books is lawfully being removed from public, shouldn't we be lawfully removing the people living out/promoting this ideology too?'

I can see why ppl don't fully understand how dangerous book bannings are, if they're not familiar with the history of fascism. If you're interested, there are plenty of graphic novels that share this history via first hand accounts- Maus, Persepolis, Banned Book Club.

But guess what? You're on limited time to get these via libraries...cos all three of these books are on banned lists too, and they got nothing to do with lgbtq rep, and everything to do with warning ppl about fascism.

And the US government knows it can get away with this, because they are passing these laws as we speak and barely anyone is doing anything about it or talking about it. I've been trying to talk about it for years and no one does anything except say to me 'don't worry, I'll buy your book!' or say its a badge of honour that I have a banned book.

THIS IS WORSE. It’s so much worse.

When you hear “there’s no AC” you probably are thinking like…oh that’s rough, but still I’ve dealt with those temps. My old place didn’t have AC. It can’t be that bad.

NO. The lack of AC trickles down into every facet of dealing with the heat in a way that slowly and quite literally boils you alive. It’s not just “oh my apartment is hot this sucks”, it’s “there is nowhere you can go to cool down and if you overheat there is no help available”

For most there’s no AC anywhere. Anywhere. The coolest place available is maybe your local church, or a shopping center. Both will kick you out around 8pm, the hottest part of the day. In France and Spain in particular, the time zone is wrong (Hitler’s fault—we’re still aligned with Germany instead of the UK) and the sun doesn’t set until 10-11pm. Heat is still being actively pumped into your living spaces at 10pm.

And the temps do not meaningfully drop overnight. (Which you might expect if you’re from the American west. Southerners do understand this.) Many people live in stone walled buildings that just keep heating up. This is very literally the experience of being in a stone oven. And there’s no way to drop the temperature. You can’t escape it.

If your body temp climbs to unmanageable levels and you start experiencing heat exhaustion, you can call the hospital…most of which also do not have AC. I’m not sure how they’re treating people, I guess with ice packs? There’s already been a handful of deaths in my city, and that’s before any kind of post-wave reporting. These are real time reported deaths.

Anyway I want you to really, really internalize the sense of panic that starts to set in when you’re in these circumstances. The animal brain really starts to go wild when there’s no options and no escape. That’s why Europeans are posting about suffering.

-derek is fun

-but he is not an adequate mental health support for janet

-once derek started causing concerns for the wellbeing of the 'society' they lived in and the safety of humans he had to get put away in a box in the void

-eventually they figured out some jobs he is helpful for in specific scenarios

that apparently still does it for people if they're lonely enough

Yes it's only the richest people with money to burn having a great time, yes our administration is still doing awful police state immigration shit to the visiting teams let alone the fans, yes this place is still a nightmare for everyone else

but there is still joy to be had and while that doesn't erase the bad, the bad does not erase the joy

Yes it's only the richest people with money to burn having a great time, yes our administration is still doing awful police state immigration shit to the visiting teams let alone the fans, yes this place is still a nightmare for everyone else

but there is still joy to be had and while that doesn't erase the bad, the bad does not erase the joy

Yes it's only the richest people with money to burn having a great time, yes our administration is still doing awful police state immigration shit to the visiting teams let alone the fans, yes this place is still a nightmare for everyone else

but there is still joy to be had and while that doesn't erase the bad, the bad does not erase the joy

A lot of the most dedicated football/soccer national team fans, aka the ones you see following their teams to other countries for a world cup, aren't Jeff Bezos rich or even old money rich. They simply dedicate what funds and PTO they have to this one specific purpose. And then you have the more casual fans, who "always wanted to go see [country X], and this is as good an occasion as any".

I understand this reads as rich, and to a degree it certainly is. But it's absolutely not "only the richest." Far from it. These are people who'll take flights with 3 layovers to save a couple bucks. These are people who saved up the last four years (since the last world cup) or longer to realize their dream. These are people who haven't gone to vacations for a decade but are grabbing this opportunity.