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Various Stuff

@notagiraffe

Formerly @shieldposts. There's no theme, I just reblog whatever I like. If you need me to tag something, let me know. If I do something offensive or problematic, please message me and let me know.
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btw watching movies you loved when you were younger will fix literally anything wrong with you

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some recent OC art that i like so much i'm being brave and actually posting it for once!

omg thank u for all the love!! to the wonderful ppl asking abt the lore, we will have a summer wedding but firstly the really short version is:

  1. all these guys exist in the pseudo-late-19th-century city of Morrefell, a terrible city that (metaphorically) wants to eat you <3
  2. the 5 characters with weird-colour eyes and hands are Weavers, people who randomly develop the ability manipulate a given element or force (they're very rare and theres probably less than 50 alive in the entire world)

i'll put some very short bios for everyone under the cut!!

"if tumblr dies you can find me on bluesky" "if tumblr dies you can find me on Instagram" if tumblr dies you cannot find me. It's over. I'm free.

I always say I want to leave, but in reality, I’m gonna be here until they turn off the lights.

so few people understand the art of the pseudo nap

naps aren’t always about sleeping sometimes they’re about setting a timer for 30 minutes and lying down closing your eyes while listening to music and/or thinking about a tv show or a cool thing that happened recently with a little bit of checking your phone interspersed

I love movies where the plot takes place in less than a day. It’s like. What if these people were experiencing the worst 8 hours of the entire lives and you got to see the highlight reel?

One of my favorite things about Put Baby In Pelican Mouth is that not only does the pelican have the intelligence necessary to speak human language but also knows how to lie, suggesting it has a theory of mind, yet not enough to understand that no one is going to put baby in pelican mouth.

To be entirely fair to the pelican, I have seen humans do much, much dumber things with their infants. The park rangers in Louisiana ha e to regularly tell people to not put their babies on the ground next to the gators for a pic.

In fact, it could be argued that the peculiar grammar used by the pelican in the Put Baby In Pelican Mouth post is deliberate, like how phishers use major grammar errors in their messages so that people too smart for the scam (or smart enough to report them) ignore the emails and the scammer can focus on the most likely marks.

Regardless, the pelican is right: there is absolutely someone dumb enough to put a baby in its mouth because it asked politely. Probably dozens on that beach alone.

Put baby in pelican mouth for Instagram photo. Facebook photo of baby in pelican mouth for many likes and also happy asleep baby. So cute baby in pelican mouth for video on TikTok. Youtube short of baby so cute in soft pelican mouth for so many views to Youtube channel. Baby in pelican mouth challenge.

your tag “sometimes a historian is someone who etches marks on the wall to catalogue your growth” made me clutch my chest and sit down. yes. i’m literally going into a public history grad program next year and you just casually summed up the entire field and why i love it. thank you

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here is a gravestone from ancient Athens, a young girl with her favorite pets.

here is a food-sharing scene from the Maya site Calakmul. when they remodeled the building, the people there packed this mural with mud to preserve it.

here is a child’s footprint stamped into clay in Mesopotamia more than 2000 years ago. many of these have been found, and some are inscribed with the children’s names. 

we don’t want to forget each other. that’s history.

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This right here. This is why I studied history, and still participate in STUFF with the local museums. It's all about the people, and the interpersonal connections. Those growth ticks on the doorpost happened in ancient societies. As did the child's footprint, or a pet's footprint, and shared meals, and baking bread, and the joys and sorrows of LIFE IN GENERAL. People tend to forget that.

here is a child’s footprint stamped into clay in Mesopotamia more than 2000 years ago. many of these have been found, and some are inscribed with the children’s names. 

SOBBING. We did this in my preschool. My mother has the clay handprints we made. Over 2000 years and we do the same thing with clay and a child's prints.

to this day i cannot BELIEVE aang called up and blew off like nine avatars just because they didnt offer any vegan options to ending the war

roku: my best friend assaulted me as a senior citizen :(

kyoshi: sometimes some murder is OK

kuruk: just punch people that disagree with you

aang: okay i’m starting to think that none of you took this avatar thing seriously

You're not wrong

Aang when he is told he’s the Avatar at age 12: *has a melt down because he understands the seriousness of this function and the consequences his new responsibilities will have on his personal life* 

other Avatars at age 16: I’m the avatar? Cool! Hey look it comes with a glowing eyes feature! 

aang: fuck this noise, i’ll get advice from the last air nomad avatar

yangchen: i gave up that hippie bullshit first chance i got, i love murder

I will never not laugh at the bit where Aang is like "finally, an Air Nomad, you get me, right?" and Yangchen just says "sorry bud, I also vote murder".

A close second on that note is of course the trial of Kyoshi in which she manifests in the courtroom just to say "Actually, I did murder him and I'd do it again. But consider: the bitch had it coming".

And the fact that he figures out a more technically complex and socially stable way to remove Ozai without making him a martyr just shows that he has a lot more skill at the problem at hand than most the previous ones.

To me, that whole scene was very much the previous avatars saying “when all you have is a hammer” and Aang going “okay, but what can I do with this Swiss Army knife?” and they don’t give very useful advice about it.

Personally I also don't think the prior Avatars were all that helpful, but they weren't all saying murder was okay. Aang's there asking for help with Avatar skills because he'd had so minimal training, maybe there's something in the toolbox he doesn't know how to use yet, but they're all trying to make him comfortable with using the hammer he already has and knows how to use. What they were saying was what they thought he needed to hear, based on what they regretted most from how they'd acted as Avatars, and what they thought was most needed here.

Roku regretted not killing Sozin specifically because it gave him the opportunity to come back and kill him, then the Air Nomads. His lack of decisive action led to a lot of tragedy, and so his advice was to make sure whatever he did, make sure it was permanent, or Ozai would come back.

Kyoshi regretted not moving sooner on the threat of Shin the Conqueror and waiting until he was at the very edge of Kyoshi Peninsula before actually doing anything. She allowed a lot of destruction on the continent because she didn't move fast enough. Her advice is to move swiftly instead of allowing Ozai more time to act.

Kuruk basically did nothing as Avatar by his own admission and basically just said that Aang had to do something, and not to back off of his responsibilities because it was hard.

Yangchen is complicated because, well, she isn't talking about one of her own regrets. She's the one trying to give the 'Violence is sometimes necessary' talk to Aang, because she's the best person to tell him his duties as Avatar have to outweigh his duties as an Airbender. Arguably she is the one telling him to murder Ozai, but personally I read that as more 'you need to do what's right for the world, and I am giving you permission to break our cultural rules to do that. Because I am the only person you can ask for absolution.'

They were all trying to offer him spiritual guidance and support, but Aang wasn't looking for emotional support here, he was looking for solutions. Because he had already decided he wouldn't kill Ozai. No advice or absolution was really going to change that he already knew he wouldn't do it.

People are SLEEPING on the most interesting Leia & Padme comparisons because there's so much focus on Leia being "like Anakin" because she gets annoyed sometimes and Padme being this perfect moral beacon of truth and justice despite all of her very canonical lies and cover-ups and obstructing of justice.

If Luke is the Jedi that Anakin should've been, then Leia is the LEADER that Padme should've been.

Padme is a hypocrite, proclaiming that all people deserve basic decency and the right to safety, but at the same time allowing Anakin to get away with a mass murder with no consequences by covering it up.

Leia doesn't even let Han get away with being a little bit of an asshole, there's no way she'd let him get away with mass murder. She holds everyone around her to a higher standard, believing in the best of them but also but refusing to accept excuses for cowardice and selfishness.

Padme talks so much about wanting the war to end, but then allows one of the opposition's biggest generals go free just to get Anakin back because she cares about him, causing the war to continue to go on for even longer.

Leia lets Luke sacrifice himself because she knows it's possibly the only way they might have a victory and beat the Empire, even though she knows what he is to her and loves him. She knows what has to be done and respects the choice Luke is making and would never condemn their efforts just to keep him with her.

Padme's story parallels Anakin's, she devolves as the narrative goes on, until she's barely a shell of the person she used to be. That strength and moral clarity she showed as a Queen is entirely gone, leaving only a scared woman pleading with a murderer to come back to her.

Leia's story parallels Luke's, she gains more and more strength and clarity as the narrative moves forward. The bossy young woman we first met has become a confident rebel leader who knows she doesn't have to harden her heart to be strong.

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