date a boy who hates coleslaw
date a boy who never lets coleslaw near you
date a boy who will chuck a bowl of coleslaw across the room if someone puts it near you
I think the counters at popular chain coffee shops I won’t name should be replaced with a fully covered area where customers can’t see the employees faces or what they’re doing. I’m talking once ler levels of obfuscation. The counter should look like this
secondly, the whole enclosed area should constantly emit various steams and smokes like a horrible machine, and employees should be encouraged to make as much conspicuous noise as possible. I want customers to walk up to what is basically a steel wall on a steel counter, nervously place their order in a microphone, hand over their method of payment through a small door, have it returned, then the cashier slams shut the door, they hear an absolute cacophany for a minute and their drink and receipt are unceremoniously slid out the very same little door in the wall
The densest people on the internet are the ones who say sci fi and fantasy are getting too political. Why can’t we go back to the good old days of The Twilight Zone, with its various episodes about mob mentality and the danger of mass paranoia that totally weren’t about the Red Scare. Or Star Wars and its genocidal empire of racially homogeneous Aryan men. Or Dune with its religious tribal peoples who live in a desert that contains the galaxy’s most valuable resource and the wars with the foreign colonizers, that was purely from Frank Herbert’s imagination. Can you imagine how much Star Trek would suck if it was packed to the brim with ham-fisted allegories of every societal issue of the 20th century. Not like all this modern ultra-political stuff, like a woman hero.
With that in mind, we’re all gonna remember that JKR is a terf who has literally been cited by legislators engaged in legislation that actively harms trans people, and we’re not gonna give her any more money.
That means not streaming the new show on Netflix, because regardless of how much influence she has on the production, she gets paid for it.
We’re gonna make the show flop. We’re gonna show Warner Brothers that we don’t forget (of course, how would we forget, it isn’t as if she’s stopped), and that their business association with terfs is no longer profitable.
It is NOT like Lovecraft, because Lovecraft is very dead and his works are in the public domain. By consuming Lovecraft media, you are not giving any money to old Howard.
reblogging this again to say some googling led to the tentative conclusion that the new remake will be on HBO max, which is owned by WarnerMedia. Netflix hasn’t hosted anything Harry Potter since early 2020, presumably because Warner is trying to direct the hp audience to their own streaming service.
Steven Universe: Eh, I don’t really feel like saying “girlfriend” or “wife”. Maybe they’re together. They have a special connection…
(gets violently shoved aside)
The Loud House/Craig of the Creek/The Owl House: Pfft, amateur. “My GIRLFRIEND Sam and I…” “I’m texting my GIRLFRIEND, mind your business.” “Luz’s new GF showed her…”
Can we not do this thing? Do you realize that Rebecca had to fight for what we got with Rupphire and literally risked her job? and Pearl and Rose. Like, there is no need to knock other shows down because of Lumity.
These kids today, I tell you what. In my day you had to bury your girlfriends under subtext and then end the series when the truth was revealed.
Risked her job, hell, it’s an open secret now that the Rupphire wedding (which, may I remind folks, was the first queer wedding in a kids’ cartoon, which is a BIG DEAL) is why everything about the rest of the series felt rushed. They had to scramble to tell the rest of the story because they took a gamble and the network retaliated by shortening their production time.
Rebecca Sugar and the crewniverse risked the entire show getting flat-out cancelled in order to show that wedding, only for people to say it “wasn’t progressive enough” and was “giving in to stereotypes” to put Ruby in a wedding dress. Never mind that Ruby kept getting dubbed over as a guy in localization, Sapphire was unmistakably feminine in every version, and putting Ruby in the dress was a flagrant way to say, “fuck you, you can’t pretend this is a straight couple; this is a queer couple and a queer wedding.”
Dana Terrace has said that The Owl House only exists with its intended queerness because of what Rebecca Sugar and her team accomplished with Steven Universe. Hell, there are multiple members of the Steven Universe team who went on to work on the other shows mentioned in the OP–Steven Sugar, for example, who is Rebecca Sugar’s brother and inspiration for SU in the first place (as well a background artist on the show), is currently an artist on The Owl House. There are people who got their start on Steven Universe who now only have the opportunity to tell more queer stories because of Steven Universe’s success.
I’m not even 30 years old yet and I’m still old enough to remember when being gay was fully illegal in the United States. Not gay marriage, but literally just BEING GAY. It wasn’t that long ago, and the fact that today in 2021 I can turn on the TV and watch gay cartoons intended for children? I never thought I’d see it. Fucking ever.
So let’s stop pitting queer creators and media against each other, shall we?
The first training of Zuko we see, Iroh shoots a fireball right into Zuko’s face - while Zuko just stands there unflinching. It’s the very first episode, and Zuko & Iroh are the obvious villains, and it just seems like some macho bs they do. And then comes the duel with Zhao, and Zuko is down, but when he sees that flaming fist to his face, something lets loose inside him that helps him turn the fight around…But it’s not until we learn Zuko’s backstory that all this gets a whole new meaning.
Why would Zuko still be on basics if not because he suffered a huge setback after his agni kai? Imagine how much hard work, patience it was to build Zuko back up again, so he would not freeze in blind panic (or curl up in a ball) when fire gets close to his face. I think Iroh practiced this with him all the time until he could stand there unflinching (knowing that Iroh is in full control of his bending and trusting that his uncle would never hurt him). And when it came to the duel with Zhao, Zuko could react in a RL situation instead of freezing up, and turn all the negative feelings (rage, anger, pain, whatever) into fuel to win the fight against a bender who is much more skilled than he is.
And Iroh obviously drilled him with control and restraint, because no matter how much he lets his rage loose, he has enough control not to hurt Zhao and enough self-restraint not to burn him at the end. I definitely think it was a deliberate choice on Iroh’s part to hold back on teaching offensive forms to Zuko beyond the basics (knowing that combining those with his unprocessed anger could result in him being out of control and hurt people). Instead, it seems he concentrated on teaching him defensive forms, fire breath, heat control, and so on…
Ooh ooh ooh! This looks like an excellent excuse valid reason to talk about one of my favorite topics, matriarch trees!
So, when you see trees in a forest, they stick up outta the ground, some distance from each other, and you’re like ‘these are unconnected critters,’ right? But! The thing is! Just like the trees in the picture are connected above-ground, trees in a forest are normally connected below-ground. There’s this whole complicated thing involving a symbiotic relationship with fungi, but we’re gonna simplify it to this: trees connect to each other through their root systems.
And they use it to share resources, across the whole forest.
If there’s a tree over here growing in soil with a lot of, like, potassium, they’ll pull up more potassium than they need, and send it out through the root system to other trees that are living where there isn’t much potassium.
And one of the coolest things? Trees communicate their needs. If a tree is sick or damaged or starving, they send chemical messages out through the root system that tell the other trees to send them more food and tree-equivalent-of-immune-system.
Trees will share so much of their resources, they’ll even keep trees alive that are almost entirely dependent. Like this tree! The tree above is getting some energy from its leaves, but no other nutrition of its own. And it wasn’t able to link up to the shared root system. So the other tree reached out and hooked up to it directly, feeding it all of the nutrients it needed!
You see it more commonly the other way around: in an old-growth forest, where the roots are well-established, you can find stumps where a tree was cut down a century ago… but if you scrape the stump it’s still green wood. The tree’s still alive, without a single leaf. Because all the other trees in the forest are feeding it.
I promised to talk about matriarch trees, so here’s where we get to them.
In a very old forest, you have very old trees. You have some trees that are so very, very old, their own roots cover entire regions of the forest. Their leaves reach up to the sky over everyone else. And after so long, they’ve developed to where they can take in way more resources than they need.
So what do they do?
They feed baby trees.
Baby saplings in an old forest can’t reach up to the sun. There’s no light down there. And their roots are too small and shallow to dig down to the nutrients they need. So the matriarch tree will draw energy from its towering canopy, and nutrients from its massive, ancient roots, and feed them to the little trees that are too small to feed themselves. For anything she can’t get on her own, she’ll act as a central hub, taking in spare resources from the rest of the forest and giving them to the little ones.
And one of the best parts - she won’t just do it for her own species. She’ll connect to all kinds of trees, because they’re all necessary for the ecosystem to work. She’ll adopt the whole forest’s children.
Sometimes in forests you’ll find a spot where there are a lot of small trees in an open space around an old, fallen tree. People generally assume they could find more light there, or maybe the soil’s more fertile from the decomposition.
But no.
They’re her children, and she’s spent centuries keeping the whole forest alive.