#LightDance

[guru360trainingaacdemy]

🥳 When the Boss Says 'Party in the Office' | Light Dance Madness! 💃😂

When the boss finally says, 'Go ahead, party in the office,' and you can’t hold back your excitement! 🥳💃 Watch this hilarious take on the ultimate office dance-off. Relatable, right? 😂 Share your fun office stories in the comments and join the celebration!

Don’t forget to like, share, and subscribe for more laugh-out-loud content. 🎉✨ Watch the Full Video on YouTube:

[skeletondancecrew]

LED Buugeng by @skeletondancecrew

[darkcircle00]

-Video not applied to 360 degrees-

<Through this experimental 360-degree video, we wanted to create a combination of captivating music and the vibrant city lights of Yeouido. Each twinkling light danced to the beat, creating a symphony of colors that transformed Seoul's skyline into a breathtaking spectacle. Improve your viewing experience by adjusting the resolution to 4K or 8K in the gear shape settings. I hope you can see Seoul living in harmony by watching this video.>

[lightdancer1]

One of the bits I'm really enjoying with In the Company of Witches and Slayers:

The Tara Maclay of this AU does duplicate a few of Willow's canonical notes, namely the equivalent of Something Blue, and resurrecting Willow in the same way that canon Willow resurrected Buffy. I also, like in my other works, use the gift that Amber Benson left of the evil Tara with Andrei Kurgan's grimoire but in a way more like what canon thought it did but didn't quite.

Instead of the magic addiction thing Tara goes on the same power trip I treat canon Willow's Dark Willow phase as and from her POV she's a victim of physical abuse who gains the power to actually hurt Glory instead of being hurt by her (there's a bit of a theme that the two villains that hurt her worst in this canon actually vehemently dislike her AU counterpart because she actually literally hurt them and made them feel it). As with canon Willow her worst traits are the results of Black magic corrupting her and less as addiction and more like the One Ring.

This AU's Dark Willow, by contrast, is a long-standing problem of suppressed rage and a combination of multiple hits with a trauma nailbat for someone with reality warping powers which is an explosive combination....and in each case the idea that there ever really WAS a Dark Willow or a Dark Tara is rejected by both Willow and Tara for very similar reasons but staunchly believed by their friends.

And since it's an unreliable narrator effect here each is equally right and wrong. Black magic really is innately corrupting because it grants the power to twist reality on a whim without any concern for the consequences and as power tends to corrupt, absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely. Does this have the equivalent effect of DID or Bruce Banner becoming the Hulk?

At least in my stories at a Doylist level, no, but in that Watsonian level the contrast between a very powerful sorcerer in full 'My Precious' mode with the One Ring and their ordinary selves is so much like it that people without the arcane knowledge to understand it can be easily forgiven for believing that's what they're seeing.

It's also that good old fashioned Scooby double standard, too. Amy Madison in particular is 'Willow if reality handed her only the bad cards and none of the good ones'. This AU's Willow recognizes that and has sympathy for her within limits and keeps trying to appeal to her good side, which is a note missed with the canon Willow where they just forgot that Amy was one of her closest friends who turned to evil. And until the Twilight war Amy is seen in-universe through Willow's eyes but after it she's seen through the eyes of other characters and she's a murderous evil witch who tries to wield human sacrifice, blood magic, and is every bit as power hungry, petty, and jealous as her canon counterpart.

Equally since this AU's Willow is invincible unless she's facing foes capable of using her weaknesses (which naturally I tend to do precisely to add creative tension) her standards of threats are skewed and what to her is a nuisance is an existential threat to everyone else. Amy and Tara, unlike in other cases, are by no means weak, they are exceptionally powerful. Since Willow is the most powerful being in the *universe*, mystically, everyone else is second rate. Second rate to the most powerful being in the infinite expanse of a single universe allows massive amounts of leg room and Tara is the second most powerful sorceress in the entire setting and Amy the third.

And Amy, if she's not facing Willow or Faith with a friendly weapon that nullifies magic like the Scythe or Olaf's Hammer, is a murderously creative juggernaut who can and does steamroll multiple enemies at once with trivial ease. This is for the villains is Buffy on hard mode, the villains that last are more badass than their canon counterparts by default.

And where canon only hinted at the worst things Willow did indirectly and in a way where people can ignore it, which was IMO one of the most foolish things it did, because if you're going to go there, go all the way or not at all, this show makes it explicit and in a way that parallels Faith and Tara just as canon pairs Faith and Willow.

And just as with canon Willow these particular aspects are explicitly a case of 'Dark Side brain rot' and very directly NOT what the actual Tara would do, and it's one of the things that haunts her most. Where canon Willow never really had to face the consequences of her actions due to the bullet (and that too is one of the best reasons for the Tara resurrection storyline) , this AU's Tara very much does face them and grows into fully being the person she could have been. Much like how canon Tara made major mistakes and was the rare Buffyverse character allowed to actually grow and become wiser from them.

This is also why a couple of my other AUs hinge on 'Willow looks into the future, sees her canon path, goes 'Hell no' and rejects it and it turns out that rejecting it works but there are some steep prices for trying'. Essentially when the characters look at canon Season 6 they balk and go 'gross, no thank you' but this setting being what it is, it fucks them up with a different nailbat because it's the Whedonverse and his characters only get yea tier nice things.

[eightblackpens]

women in stem (plant joke,

[jdhphotgraphy]

[lightdancer1]

The Lightdancer made landfall upon Urhalzan in the wake of her first clashes, the worlds remade and their cultures changed not so the demons lurking within hearts and the evil inclinations would be nourished but the better ones. She had learned much, had delved deep into hidden truths and had found that core that lay within. The great throneworld of the Hundred Thousand Realms was a beautiful place, stark and golden and a monument to power and to her father's great work.

And he had sought, in the end, a kind of power that was very risky and her steps on its soil marked the return of something long forgotten. One of her siblings, one of the older ones, looked at her with his right hand's claws brushing his jaw-horn.

You....

She turned to look at him and smiled, a smile in a face that to the children of Earth would have been the more disturbing for how close to humanity was, until of course it wasn't.

Yes, me. I have discovered the truth. The legacy of the Field of Blood has reached a new turning in the cycle.

She raised her right hand and shadows danced along it and in the shadows there was a smell, an old smell, one long-forgotten on the throneworld though horridly familiar where the tide of conquest drew to the shore like a tsunami raging at the height of its power.

I have returned, a voice that was not hers spoke without her lips moving, her presence casting a great shadow on the golden world, for what was sealed can never truly be taken away. Of all beings that fear me, it is the Undying that do so most.

Many ages ago Death was defeated and sealed. Immortality is the norm, but the loss of death has lead to a society of ultralites that rule over never dying slaves. As Death’s first reaper after the unsealing, you are here to remind them why Death exists… and why your master should be feared.

[skeletondancecrew]

Stage on Fire 🔥 with BMW Group

[skeletondancecrew]

Captivated by the heartwarming response and affection from our wonderful audience.

An unforgettable performance for Bahrain Tourism in the beautiful #Bahrain. 💫🌟

[lightdancer1]

This is a trite explanation that skips over the real reason, the USA is the current global empire and has the power to act as such. When European states were the masters of three quarters of the worlds outside the slices the USA and Japan ruled their cultures were very like the USA as it is now. If you want proof of this, look at how current Russia operates as it very much has the 'we are an empire and deserve to have all of our old one back' mentality active. The rest of this hemisphere was also built by religious extremists who were highly racist and wanted an elite of rural barons who built their money on the mud, blood, and tears of other cultures. The entire set of European settler colonialists all share the same basic types of origin as the USA.

Australia was built by fucking criminals who treated Indigenous Australians in between Indigenous Americans and Black people because they were Black indigenous peoples (and yes they very much did use the N-word as a slur for Indigenous Australians plenty of times).

Europeans congratulate themselves on having civilized themselves only after the USSR and the USA took away their capacity to butcher each other with impunity and dismantled their empires to add injury to insult. Europeans vote in the UK Tories, the Le Pens have moved from fringe to mainstream French Right, Sweden elected fascists because the Scandies hate anyone who isn't a Nazi propaganda poster archetype in appearance and they aren't subtle about that at home. Islamophobia in Europe has an utterly unsubtle 'we didn't have our grandpa either kill the Jews or turn them over to the fucking Nazis to allow these REDACTED to take their place' vintage. And then there's Russia, which is.....Russia. And has waged genocidal wars in its own territory and abroad in Syria and now in Ukraine.

Japan is a capitalist dystopia run by ultra-nationalist racists.

Evangelicals are a trite excuse for the pathologies of American culture, the reality is that the problems start and stem from empire and its mental concepts to frame it. Evangelicalism took over the Republican Party because after Nixon Reaganism, which already existed and bombed horribly against LBJ in 1964, came back with a vengeance and other alternative models of conservatism lacked any measurable popular support, while Evangelicals were the people happy to switch the D- to the R- and turned the Dixiecrats into the Southern Republican Party.

No, the existing fundamentalist strand is no more the sole reason for why American culture is rife with pathology anymore than Islam is for the Arab world, or Christianity for Europe. I hate this bullshit because it treats American kooks like these people have some natural innate power. They don't. They gained that power in the 1980s, and it's not like the Taft-Nixon brand of conservatism that embraced McCarthyism and was happy to let the Nazis and Stalinists have free rein over Europe was somehow an improvement.

To my international friends: If you ever wonder why Americans are the way they are, just remember that 1/3rd of all US citizens are in a cult that teaches them to suppress the activity of their prefrontal cortex, particularly when it comes to doubt, critical thinking, and differentiating emotional responses from personal values.

[lightdancer1]

That anyone believed the Gimbutas 'Goddesses fix misogyny' thesis when Ancient Athens is a thing is incredible, and Athena is precisely why:

And last, before moving into the realities behind all the literary elements, but most revealing of all for how little the Goddess actually mean in debunking misogyny at the time.....Athens was named after Athena, its patron Goddess. Athens, mind you, the most infamously misogynistic part of ancient Greece. Its entire founding myth roots it solidly in choosing to be Athens instead of Poseidonopolis, and yet that myth made it the most blatantly misogynistic society in the Ancient world in Western Eurasia, rivaled only by Imperial China in the East.

Athena Herself is a Goddess of many factors, but not least among them is being the ever-victorious guardian of strategic war, not the BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD variety. That was Ares' prerogative, and why Ares was despised everywhere in Greece....save Sparta. Equally ironically Ares is also the only deity in Classical myth who actually had legitimate respect for women (hence one aspect of Aphrodite leaping into His arms) which has its own effects on the city that worshiped Him as Patron....Sparta.

[lightdancer1]

Equally there is the irony that one of the most famous histories of the Han was written by a woman:

One must also note that the existence of women historians and their great and sweeping influence no more than the Goddess sweeps away misogyny in all its forms. Ban Zhao, like Anna Comnena, owed her status to connections to the Imperial family and leveraged it for a history of great skill and depth on the family she was a part of. The history she wrote was of the Western, or former Han, in the wake of the brief hiatus caused by the reign of Emperor Wang Mang. It stands as a classic of Chinese history and literature and means that her influence is a very similar one to those of Publius Cornelius Tacitus or Gaius Seutonius Tranquilitus.

This is also a point worthy of emphasis, that all histories and all cultures have their bits of nuance and complexity like this. Famously ultra-misogynistic Confucian literary and bureaucratic culture owed one of its greatest classics to the very people they worked so hard to keep in a third-rate position at best. No more than Western cultures did they accept that this was a contradiction, first, and that the contradiction mattered very greatly.

Equally one must also note that all history is full of these kind of anomalies that make it a very living thing, and that to judge cultures by their self-proclaimed ideological views is to blind oneself to the much deeper realities these cultures live and abide by.

[lightdancer1]

The most disturbing reality of the life of Sally Hemings is that there is a spotlight on it because of who Thomas Jefferson was. It was not that unique in itself.

And that life testifies to the invisible reality that will be gone into in more detail tomorrow in the 19th Century. The experiences of Black women, as defined by modern scholars like Kimberle Crenshaw, form and have always formed an intersectional axis of how the various categories of repression and oppression in American democracy worked and continue to work. Black women were invisible, hence the phrasing "Blacks and women." Black women were also subject to very particular horrors and types of exploitation in slavery, one of the seediest, filthiest underbellies of the entire Old South.

Insofar as things were and are unique here, at another level, it is also because of Sally Hemings being Martha Jefferson's half-sister. THAT was an extra level of sleaze that really was unusual even for plantation owners. But beyond that, her life, as much as it was defined by being the most well-known case of what was standard practice on plantations, speaks of what the truth of the 'Peculiar Institution' was, the deformities worked on the corroded consciences of the slaveowner, and the realities of how much it took to endure those horrors when one was the enslaved person.

This is one of many, many invisible strands of American history whose recovery is no small part of the effort to censor and ban Black history today.

[lightdancer1]

Cudjoe and Nanny Smith straddle the 17th and 18th Centuries and the shift from Spanish power to British:

Another in the sequence of great charismatic resistance leaders would be Cudjoe, who had an even longer career than Sebastian Lemba. His started in the 1690s and laid the groundwork for the unified communities that would fight the First Maroon War in the 1730s. Cudjoe and Nanny, his sister and governor of the first independent Black community in the now-British Empire, Nanny Town, put up a long fight though she died before he did by murder at the hands of the British Empire. The Empire grudgingly signed the treaties with the Maroons who had semi-official recognition and cast a long shadow over the sugar empire that took its specifically British form over the Spanish.

[lightdancer1]

Juan Garrido is of note as being one of the survivors of Hernan Cortez's Conquest of Mexico:

Juan Garrido is one of the very literal cases of 'history was never as white as it's portrayed in European sources.' He was part of the Spanish conquest of Cuba and Puerto Rico. He was also one of those who was a part of the Hernan Cortez expedition from the newly established city of Vera Cruz marching to the Halls of Montezuma, who survived La Noche Triste, and was one of the victors in the Siege of Tenochtitlan.

Equally of note given the nature of everything that led to Las Casas' role in the establishment of the slave trade, like the other conquerors of Tenochtitlan he set up an Encomienda, and has the record of being the first farmer in mainland North America to grow wheat. By all accounts Garrido was one of the more successful Conquistadors, moreso than either Cortez himself or Pizarro would prove to be.

One must also note that in the context of the 1500s neither Juan Garrido nor Hernan Cortez themselves could have expected that the march on the Aztec capital would provide the basis for as much as it did, while both viewed the horrors of the conquest as deserving a reward while being no more sympathetic than any other conquerors to the conquered.

[lightdancer1]

George Washington Carver was one of the greatest human beings that ever lived:

We owe it to him that humanity was and is able to feed itself, and that is not an exaggeration. He revolutionized agriculture in all the ways that stand to this day.