3...2...1... takeoff! 🚀 @ash-and-starlight & @ranilla-bean here to launch our project for @zukkabigbang2024 🐦⬛🐦⬛
Rating: M
Fandom: Avatar the Last Airbender
Pairing: Sokka/Zuko
Chapters: 1/15
Beta: @faux-fires
Tags: Alternate Universe - Space, Space Opera, Depictions of Violence, Minor Character Death, Dilf Zukka, War, Han solarpunk, loosely inspired by Red Cliff (dir. John Woo), Decolonisation, Ghosts, the narrative is haunted, Getting Together, Slow Burn, eventual sexual content (i prommy), BBL Ozzy, thematically relevant magpies, interplanetary old man yaoi saves the galaxy
Summary:
In the XXXth span of the galactic war against the Phoenix King, the Avatar, Master of the Four Elements, summoned his trusted advisor to his side…
Avatar Aang, prosecutor of the long war against the Fire Nation, tasks General Sokka with the recruitment of a secret friend hidden on his old home planet Emptiness II, razed a century ago. There, Sokka finds an impossible community, where peoples from all quadrants of the galaxy have taken root—headed by the Phoenix King’s own son Zuko. As he comes to trust them, Sokka becomes invested in the community. But war is barrelling towards them, and he must harness the spark between himself and Zuko to save Emptiness II… and the rest of the galaxy.
last three seasons spn are crazy. its just dean being borderline suicidal while sam tries to fix it by basically dangling his keys at him and going : “dean look! cowboys!” “dean look! strip club!” “dean look! haunted action figure.”
Meanwhile castiel is like i see that dean is suicidal, this is clearly my fault so i will remedy this by dying.
but they don't care about the burnout. everyone is burnt out, they tell me. who isn't burnt out!
the good news is they don't say depression is a choice as much anymore, but the symptoms for burn out and depression are so hand-in-hand that they are mirror images of each other. but depression is serious. you're not depressed, you're just whiny. they barely change the script - don't be lazy! burn out is for people with real problems. burn out can be resolved with some fun candles and a day off work. burn out only happens in adults - no kid can be burnt out, after all; they've barely even had a life to live!
do you have a roof over your head and a steady job? you're not burnt out. so what if every night you wake up with a panic attack frothing inside your chest. you're lucky your problems are small. get back into plants or into yoga. shut up about it.
rich people get burnt out and go to fancy places. they get burnt out in their fancy offices with their real-people problems. they get burnt out and hire an assistant to help them never burn out again. you don't have the money to burn out. you don't have the two weeks to recover in a local spa. the job you come back to will still be stressful and hard.
you find yourself often wondering - does nobody remember about the pandemic? it seems almost like a joke or a punchline. being burnt-out was okay "during" the pandemic. now that people are back to ignoring covid, burnout is just-an-excuse again.
you google how to know if it's seasonal affective disorder or burnout. you google how to know if it's anxiety or it's burnout from working.
you google how to know if my depression is back or i'm burning out badly.
coming back from burnout just leaves you covered in ashes, not new growth. you struggle to get back basics, and then - you're just supposed to get back up and keep going. every day the amount of tasks you are able to do seems to dwindle even further - where does the time go? why is everything moving so-fast-and-yet-so-slow?
my therapist and i were talking about how many people had latent mental illnesses that were triggered by the pandemic. how depression can be environmental and situational. i am annoyingly logic-driven about my own recovery - i like to be sure i'm working on the "right" thing. i tell her i feel like i'm lying. that it just might be burnout, and i need to stop complaining. she asks me what words come to mind when i think of burning.
oh, i guess i see.
we casually ignore the violence of being left empty.
saw the event announcement and had to immediately drop everything and get back to my favorite pasttime (drawing Lilia). sure don't want me saving up my keys, huh, do you Twst?
It is a good thing that the BG3 team is attentive and we get updates all the time, but where does it end? If they are going to continue changing stuff about the game per request, what will be there left of what they envisioned in the first place? Especially for character traits and dialogue, like making them kinder and more likeable, just because there were two more people asking for it and they happened to see it. I just don't want to see characters shift into generic ones just because of a need to respond to everyone's ideas
higher ranked reader being shot and hiding that in front of her team; she'd tell everyone that they did a good job and now they can rest, with a fake smile on her face.
she winces from pain in her room, when she pulls up her shirt, now stained with blood; there's crazy amount of hisses when she disinfects the wound. it's on her hip, not great to do all the stitches herself, she could mess it up badly.
when she's about to do it, ghost comes with everything that she needs to stitch her up. she's about to say something.
"don't move." it's all he says, his grip firm on her hip, keeping her in place so she won't try to protest.
she doesn't.
they sit there in silence, she's humming her favorite song, and he listens; she has pretty voice, but he doesn't say it, nor that it makes his job a bit... easier, better.
it's intimate, when she places her hand on his shoulder, whispering almost silent "thank you", and he just nods. nods, and gives her a little smile, when she smiles.
they both know they're pretty much fucked, ghost especially because she has a husband - but it's not his obligation, right? to stay faithful.
it's hers, and his is just taking her orders.
so, he decides it's the first time to make himself happy and fuck others:) from this time, he will completely ignore the fact that she has a husband. and god, it could only end badly.
the rise of AI art isn't surprising to us. for our entire lives, the attitude towards our skills has always been - that's not a real thing. it has been consistently, repeatedly devalued.
people treat art - all forms of it - as if it could exist by accident, by rote. they don't understand how much art is in the world. someone designed your home. someone designed the sign inside of your local grocery store. when you quote a character or line from something in media, that's a line a real person wrote.
"i could do that." sure, but you didn't. there's this joke where a plumber comes over to a house and twists a single knob. charges the guy 10k. the guy, furious, asks how the hell the bill is so high. the plumber says - "turning the knob was a dollar. the knowledge is the rest of the money."
the trouble is that nobody believes artists have knowledge. that we actively study. that we work hard, beyond doing our scales and occasionally writing a poem. the trouble is that unless you are already framed in a museum or have a book on a shelf or some kind of product, you aren't really an artist. hell, because of where i post my work, i'll never be considered a poet.
the thing that makes you an artist is choice. the thing that makes all art is choice. AI art is the fetid belief that art is instead an equation. that it must answer a specific question. Even with machine learning, AI cannot make a choice the way we can - because the choices we make have always been personal, complicated. our skills cannot be confined to "prompt and execution." what we are "solving" isn't just a system of numbers - it is how we process our entire existence. it isn't just "2 and 2 is 4", it's staring hard at the numbers and making the four into an alligator. it's rearranging the letters to say ow and it is the ugly drawing we make in the margin.
at some point, you will be able to write something by feeding my work into a machine. it will be perfectly legible and even might sound like me. but a machine doesn't understand why i do these things. it can be taught preferences, habits, statistical probability. it doesn't know why certain vowels sound good to me. it doesn't know the private rules i keep. it doesn't know how to keep evolving.
"but i want something to exist that doesn't exist yet." great. i'm glad you feel creative. go ahead and pay a fucking artist for it.
this is all saying something we all already knew. the sad fucking truth: we have to die to remind you. only when we're gone do we suddenly finally fucking mean something to you. artists are not replicable. we each genuinely have a skill, talent, and process that makes us unique. and there's actual quiet power in everything we do.
I like to think that the only reason Otto doesn't flirt with Branch is because he considers Branch too young for him but not like in a "oh sweetie I'm too old for you" type of way but in a "Ew who let this 16 year old in" type of way. Like Otto seems like the type to absolutely despise kids in public spaces, and even tho Branch his NOWHERE considered a child, Otto still treats him like that. Aka, "Why did they even let you in here?" "I'm 25."
Otto isn't scared of the bros... He's scared of Poppy 😳 ... but don't give him too much credit