"gay or european" also goes for middle-aged women btw. that lady with short hair no makeup and sneakers isn't a lesbian she's just german

AND YET A TRACE OF THE TRUE SELF EXISTS IN THE FALSE SELF

this post is about plastic dinosaurs

cant beleive it. donasairs.

how it feels to be online these days

It feels as if there is so little respect for joy. We give misery and rage space, we give space for disgust, and lust and fear, and sometimes we need to, but I wish we accepted that joy needs space too.

Hey dude, I noticed you attempting to carve a small space for joy in the face of overwhelming sadness. Have you considered monetizing it?

do people know that a french ex-president (nicolas sarkozy, from 2007 to 2012) is currently wearing an electronic bracelet after he was sentenced for corruption and influence peddling? do people know? i want everyone to know 😌

and that bernard squarcini, the head of internal security (DGSI) during sarkozy's presidency, just got convicted for influence peddling and has to wear an ankle bracelet for at least two years? 😌🙏

and that marine le pen, leader of the far-right party et one of the (ex)favorites for the 2027 presidential elections, has to wear an ankle bracelet for at least two years and is ineligible for five years?? 😌🙌✨️

My American ass watching other presidents face some form of consequence for wrongdoing…

Got some posca markers and decided to do some wheel of time portraits 🤘

I love all books but sometimes you read a book and you’re like so were all 21 thousand of you blindfolded and at gun point when you rated it 5 stars

Elayne's time in the circus learning the actual practice behind all the theoretical queen qualities she's been taught was probably the most pivotal aspect of her succeeding in taking the throne. One huge theme Jordan likes to play with using his leaders is the gap between a person who knows how to do something and a person who has done something. Have you ever had a boss who couldn't do your job, but thought they could? Sucked ass, right? Same applies to a monarch.

The circus arc, made more potent by Tanchico before it, was an extended sequence that forced Elayne to reckon tangibly with everything she didn't know how to do, try to learn those things, and accept what she couldn't learn. She was surrounded by people with very specific, hard-to-learn skills that she had to watch others respect or be impressed by, and for the first time in her life, those skills were not centered around the acquisition or exercise of power.

To put it really simply, Elayne learned deep, to-the-marrow humility for the first time from the circus arc. There's "being humiliated", which happened plenty before that, but the circus arc taught how to be humble. Being humiliated doesn't make you humble; respecting others' expertise does. She and Nynaeve both go through this similar curve where they're forced to recognize people like Thom/Bayle/Juilin, Luca, and the circus performers as unique agents who have skills beyond their own. That's step one; step two is that they accept that and actively seek those people's help when it's relevant.

Now, of course, calling Elayne "humble" at any point in the series is... uh... not correct. But from this point on, she's actually constantly aware of the fact that there are people in the world who are good at things she'll never even begin to approach. She always knew there'd be stronger channelers or fighters and more knowledgeable politicians, but she didn't understand how to respect the skill of someone who can, say, tame an animal. After the circus arc, she does understand that, and without that understanding, she would never have been able to spread her power base widely enough to succeed in the succession.

When Elayne asks someone to come to her aid or back her, they can see in her eyes that she's asking them because she understands that she is not wholly better than they are. They can see that she's not trying to put another body behind herself for the numbers; she picked them because they have assets, skills, knowledge, or connections that she doesn't, and she respects that difference. It's a completely qualitative difference that's entirely subtextual, but it's there.

You got my brain working… Tuon ends up focusing on the basics/base needs in her version of the circus arc. Food, shelter, clothing, bathroom breaks. She’s directly dependent on someone else’s generosity & reputation. She is watching stonefaced as people begin to reject her authority, or see her as less than all-powerful.

She’s trying to be above it all but is being brought down to earth (also this all starts with her feeling that her eyes are lowered, and then the earth is literally swallowing some people up, & she goes through a bunch of underworlds b/c this is Tuon Athaem Kore Paendrag’s Persephone experience etc), in contrast to Elayne, who is trying to get down to earth but is actually walking a tightrope high in the air (and learning some humility anyway b/c it’s about recognizing skilled labor & value where you see it).

I was talking about this in DMs with @gunkreads and he also pointed out that Mat gets things done very low to the ground, as it were; he shuns a lot of the power for power’s sake stuff & signaling of nobility and gets genuine grassroots loyalty from the people he leads because they see him as someone to emulate, someone who is in some way like them, someone whose success they will share if they follow his lead.

Contrast both common soldiers and titled nobility ‘looking up to’ Mat, with how ‘the farmers very properly kept their eyes on the ground’, literally, when they met Tuon. Tuon has a hard time parsing this kind of loyalty, because she’s never been seen as anyone’s equal or something anyone could reasonably aspire to be, except maybe among her family or in her skills with taming. Tuon understands loyalty when she sees it, and while she does not get the way it works for Mat, she does have to admit that it works for him.

The lesson Tuon has to learn isn’t really that she needs to respect the animal trainers in the circus, although she does have to start out with the baby steps of understanding that just because some trainers do things differently, doesn’t mean it doesn’t work. (Mat demonstrating his mastery in different ways is this lesson, from the minor ‘whispering to a horse calms it down’ to the major ‘we don’t use the a’dam here’.)

What Tuon really needs to be taught is to respect the animals [/people she thinks are animals/people she thinks of as lesser than her/people]. Which I’d argue she is at least subconsciously thinking about, given all that big cat imagery in her head, the venomous snake that I think she kinda identifies with, the weird interlude where they all dodge a group of wild longhorn cattle, etc. Tuon’s actually constantly thinking about how to respect dangerous wild animals & give them their space, especially once she leaves the protective enclosures of the circus for the Altaran wilderness.

But making the conceptual leap that ‘respecting dangerous animals’ is the same as ‘respecting dangerous people’ is the thing she still has to work on. Specifically, giving people (channelers, non-Seanchan, lower-ranked Seanchan) their space & not making them feel threatened, and not assuming that people (channelers, non-Seanchan, lower-ranked Seanchan) are a threat just because they could hurt her, if they aren’t actually hurting her.

This is maybe the first time in her adult life (or entire life?) that she’s given up control in the presence of a threat, or been in the presence of equals who are not a threat, and she doesn’t have a ton of time to practice treating people as nonthreatening equals before her old life comes back in and reinforces all her old habits, unfortunately.

I’m thinking here of @veliseraptor saying that Tuon has half of an accidental domestication arc; she’s a traumatized creature that has to be habituated to normal relationships, and Mat & company only got so far. Like, she’s house trained and she won’t bite people anymore unless you really push her, but they can’t stop her from attacking other dogs yet.

I love seeing people complain about the wot show focusing on "random aes sedai number X" instead of the main characters because what do you mean? This is the wheel of time, the series that introduces 10 new aes sedai each book that you have to read and pay attention to! God help us if this show ever gets to the salidar arc!

Anyways, who's your favorite "random" aes sedai? Mines Saerin Asnobar because she's a brown ajah who will not hesitate to stab you

If nintendo doesn’t want me to pirate their games they should make mayro kart 4 dallars

Omg.. okay I follow a bunch of channels that are made by people who do free cleaning for people in really dire hoarding/damaged house circumstances mostly older disabled people and the free cleanings are often recorded to show how to take care of extremely bad damage to houses yourself, anyway one of them recently had to put out a statement where she said the GREAT MAJORITY of requests for CHARITY CLEANING she gets was fucking LANDLORDS!!!!!! Particularly those that recently had someone move out and want free cleaning before marketing again. And she basically made a big statement politely stating she’ll never do a cleaning for a landlord and they need to stop asking. Ngl that’s some crazy composure if I was in her position I’d just come over and bulldoze the house

I still can’t get over this. Like these are emergency cleanings meant for disabled people in unlivable conditions and the purpose of recording it is to help people learn how to maintain or repair their own homes in bad circumstances. Can you imagine watching someone who regularly deals with biohazards for free and thinking “yeah it’s appropriate to request they clean the housing im holding hostage before I rent it again”

I just think that if nintendo is going to create a feature that even gets a dedicated button as part of the selling point then you should not need to pay a subscription service just to use it

huh weird.