Oh, hello.

Art by the wonderful @ube-kun!

Avatar Yumi is the Avatar OC that I've been spinning around in my head for the last 9 years. My original concept for the Earthbending Avatar after Korra.

I call her story Avatar: The Broken Earth

The story goes like this:

75 years after Kuvira's defeat, the Earth Continent is divided between a number of states, most of which are ruled by authoritarian governments. And the most despotic of them all is Shield Island, an isolationist military dictatorship off the eastern coast of the continent.

15 years old Yumi has been a patriotic citizen of Shield Island ever since she joined the training academy to become a bodyguard to the island's Supreme Commander. But the course of her life changes when she finds out she is the Avatar, the sworn enemy of the state, the person she was indoctrinated since birth to hate.

Now she must flee the only home she's ever known and drift from place to place as a refugee, looking for safety. Along the way she meets new friends who will help her on her journey.

Andon is a carefree guy. A firebender from the lower ring of Ba Sing Se who's practiced in the ways of the road. He offers to become Yumi's guide and the two travel together.

Yonten is the great-great-granddaughter of Aang and proud of it. A rather arrogant airbender who cares deeply about a lot of things, which goes against her people's philosophy of detachment.

Reza is an industrious and polite young boy. Very smart but also very ignorant about a lot of things since he came from a sheltered home. That sheltered home being the mobile imperial palace of the Second Earth Empire, where he was the emperor.

Wy is a waterbender from the Foggy Swamp Tribe. A weirdo even by her own people's standards, she likes to dabble in the dangerous and off-putting. She rejected the path decided for her and chose to be an apprentice to an apothecary that many (including Wy) call a witch.

Likai is Yumi's animal guide. A spider-cat stray who lived around the bodyguard academy's grounds. He would always come back even when told to go away. He is the last connection Yumi has to her home. His name literally means "go away".

Reza is actually a non-bender.

The Second Earth Empire isn't a top-down fascist dictatorship like Kuvira's empire, but more of a loose collection of semi-independent states and warlords that all on-paper swear fealty to the emperor.

It's loosely inspired by the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact.

I already started writing their story!

For movies, here is the beginner's list:

And the more advanced list:

Not all these movies are necessarily good, but the ones that gave me small pop culture epiphanies. It made me realize that 30%-40% of the jokes from modern sitcoms are references/parodies- and these movies are their source material.

^^ This is also true for socializing. So many people I thought were naturally funny were just doing movie bits.

I really like how the scientology speedrunning trend is developing, in this clip we see that the participants are

Not deterred by the closed door

Working as a group

Protecting their identities

Inflicting material costs to the institution via property destruction

Getting away at the end

ask and ye shall receive: When I write in Japanese I usually also throw it in google translate to double check that I'm not using the wrong kanji by mistake, and two years ago it gave me very dry and literal translations.

I was doing it today and noticed it had a pretty strong voice added to the output

For reference, to give a dry translation I would put: Lately I'm into in Hanafuda. Nobody seems to know anything about it here, so they probably wouldn't understand my brilliant jokes. I guess you guys will never be able to understand "Mister November and the Scary Cave".

I have a fluent friend who is able to check my work for me and give me tips on hitting the correct tone (I was going for a comically casual feeling), so I'm confident that I'm expressing the feeling I'm intending. While Google is also hitting the same emotion, I really don't like knowing that it's assigning tone in the first place.

To check if it was editorializing based on informal grammatical choices, I formal'd up the writing to be more polite and remove any non-standard vocabulary.

What do you mean I'm just using the browser versi-

Since wifi is just a standard for sending data through radio waves, and radio waves can go a pretty long way if you use ‘em right, it’s not that difficult to connect two computers by wifi from across town. Then you just keep adding more computers to the network and you’ve got internet!

Small antennae, like for connecting across the neighborhood, can literally be built out of trash

And a larger, more accurate one can be built pretty cheap too

(You can also reuse an old satellite TV dish, or really anything else that’s roughly parabolic)

There are LoRa meshnets in places like New York, India, and all over Europe: Spain (pictured below), Greece, Austria, Germany, etc

As for sharing fresh mëmês, the network to go to is Scuttlebutt. Unlike most social media, Scuttlebutt posts are stored on your computer and sent directly to your friends’ computers (rather than being stored on the cloud and sent to a central server). It works just fine over traditional internet, but you can also view and interact with it offline, and it has protocols for connecting over any means that two computers can share information - that includes LoRa, as well as hardwired connections, sneakernet (basically mailing a USB stick back and forth), etc

What that means is you always know that your info is just as safe as the network it’s sent on and the computer that receives it - no one even theoretically has the ability to collect and sell it all. And, since it’s all run on your computer, there’s no servers to go down or companies to go out of business that could destroy the whole thing