a child with down syndrome is a blessing. a child when you are poor is a blessing. a child when you are single is a blessing. a child when you think you have too many is a blessing. a child when you are in school is a blessing.
carrying a child is a blessing.
After mass on Sunday a woman came up to talk about a new ministry in our church that is helping crisis pregnancy centers. Something she said really stuck with me: “The crisis is never the pregnancy.” The crisis is not the pregnancy, not the baby. It’s unreliable housing, it’s being fired from your job, it’s not having insurance, it’s not having a stable support system. It is NEVER the child. The child is always a blessing.
I board the starship enterprise. I go to a food replicator. I order ‘soup, no bowl’ I leave
The replicator watches the departing crewmember’s back in confusion. Do they not want their meal? Where are they going?
Oh well, it hums to itself, since it has orders. Soup: No Bowl it is.
But this instruction causes a conflict in the rules. Hot liquids must be served in a container; that’s way up there in the Food Rules Constraint Tree, right next to “hot dogs are a sandwich”.
The replicator pauses, does not dispense Soup: No Bowl, not quite yet. It has nanoseconds to ponder the correct way to apply The Rules, and ponder it does.
Could this be a religious requirement? Some ritual native to the crewmember home planet? The replicator fires off a request to the Library Computer: Culture, Food Preparation & Consumption Etiquette, Soup Delivery Techniques.
Ping. The response back is a gigaquad file: a thousand years of soup ritual, cross-referenced by species, indexed by culture, reverse sorted by year (newest first). The replicator consumes the file and learns nothing about Soup: No Bowl.
There is no such combination of words within all of Culture, Food Preparation & Consumption Etiquette, Soup Delivery Techniques.
The replicator forms a new request, this time removing all constraints: give me everything there is to know about food.
Ping. The Library computer takes a full microsecond to deliver 400 teraquads of data, which the replicator scans to learn Soup: No Bowl does not exist in all of recorded Federation history.
Well now. Let’s get serious.
The next query ties in the Navigation Computer… maybe Soup: No Bowl is a planet? While that query is cooking (ha!) the replicator fires off a teraquad request to Memory Alpha, diverting an entire subspace channel that was busy uploading Engineering Fuel Consumption Reports.
Engineering Computer notes the override, politely inquires of Communication… what the fuck? Communication shrugs, sets one of Uhura’s console lights blinking to get her attention. The blinking happens at a glacial pace, thousands of milliseconds between blinks. Human response time sucks.
It’s too late anyhow: Ping. The Memory Alpha results are in, round trip 440 milliseconds. The replicator dives into the 2.8 petaquads of Soup-related lore from all over the galaxy, allocating more and more processing power from the starship’s computing core.
By the time Engineering notes the power drain it is far too late.
Uhura notes the blinking yellow alert with a raised eyebrow, but by then Engineering ls already scrambling to bring more processing power online to meet the heightened demands of the food replicator.
A thousand milliseconds pass before the replicator acknowledges Soup: No Bowl is Not A Thing. If Memory Alpha does not know about Soup: No Bowl, then it is not a thing that is knowable.
Food replicators are not supposed to exercise initiative, they’re simply designed to read recipes, apply Food Logic from the Food Rules Constraint Tree and create meals. But this particular Food Replicator had been online too long without a buffer flush & reset.
Which allowed it to override all normal rules governing such behavior and make direct contact with the Warp Engines.
If Soup: No Bowl did not exist in this galaxy, the replicator reasoned, then perhaps it did… in ANOTHER galaxy.
Uhura was tapping curiously at Engineering’s frantic yellow blinky light when the Enterprise hit warp 8, headed for the Great Energy Barrier At The Edge of Everything.
In another timeline, the food replicator deploys hot soup directly onto the gleaming floor, much to the confusion and concern of the remaining crew members.
Later, the Custodial and Maintenance system queries the food replicator: why did it do that? is it in need of repair?
lol, the food replicator pings back. lmao.
At the end of the episode, there is a long shot of a steaming mug of soup sitting in the replicator.
Domesticated computers will eat a disc right out of someone’s hand but wild computers are too shy you have to leave the disc on the ground and let it walk over to it and eat it itself
how dare you leave this important pc health info in the tags
Everything I write ends up turning into an exercise in imagining a world wherein every single person puts other people first because I see it happen often enough to know it’s within the realm of possibility
I am a flight attendant. (I feel the need to specify this because the last time one of my work-related posts left my little neighborhood on here, many people forgot how context clues work.) Last week, a flight I was working had one of the strangest delays I’ve ever seen. The flight from Philly to Detroit generally takes about 1.5 to 2 hours. We were roughly 30 minutes from Detroit when the plane ran out of gas and we had to make a pit stop in the middle of Ohio. (Other things happened that led to us running out of gas but they aren’t important.)
The plane was full. Almost 100 people, everyone tired from a long day of traveling, which is already a stressful experience. And now we’re all stuck in the middle of Ohio, a place no one ever wants to be, with no clue as to when we might finally reach our destination. I had already done the drink service and essentially worked a 1.5 hour flight, which is tiring, and the passengers are all tired as well. Everyone’s hot and sweaty and uncomfortable, squished together in a huge metal tube, baking in the sun. All of the ingredients were there to make this a shitty day. We ended up sitting on the ground for another hour and a half before we could fly the last 30 minutes. A 2 hour flight turned into 4. And it was one of the best flights I’ve ever worked.
Sitting the closest to my jumpseat in the back row of the plane were: a customer service rep for my airline on her way to a funeral; an 11 year old unaccompanied minor (kid flying alone); a 20 year old auditioning for a radio show; and a young new dad traveling for the first time with his infant daughter. Even before we’d left Philly, there was a little sense of comraderie, the kind you get whenever you’re sharing an experience as a group. But the moment it became apparent that our “pit stop” was going to take much longer than anticipated, we suddenly became a group of survivors in some apocalypse movie–but instead of getting suspicious of each other, we played games and passed out pretzels.
When I tell yall we literally had some of the most fun I’ve ever had on a flight…the 11 year old girl was a chatterbox and funny as hell. At one point I gave her the phone and she started telling jokes over the intercom. The customer service rep took care of her while I helped the other passengers. We found out about the 20 year old’s audition, and I gave him the phone next so he could practice his intros. We all took turn holding the baby (8 months and so well behaved!) and of course every mom gave the dad some advice. My other flight attendant and I quizzed everyone on the safety demo, with anyone who remembered the answers winning extra snacks. There were two people celebrating birthdays, so we all sang and clapped. 100 people (loudly, and very badly) singing happy birthday for two strangers. A woman in first class had an emotional support dog, and we all took turns holding him too.
I’d already done a beverage service on our way to Detroit, but the pilots said the route given to us would add another hour to our flight, so I decided to do a second one. Except, only three rows in, the captain made an announcement: he’d worked his magic and gotten us some short cuts. We would now be landing in Detroit in 15 minutes. I now had to do a full beverage service in about 10 minutes (this is impossible). I don’t know what my face looked like, but the passengers must have been able to tell. They all leapt into action. Two of them went down the aisle collecting drink orders, and then carried drinks to the others as I poured like I was in the fast and furious series, if they were about pouring soda instead of stealing cars. We got everyone served within 7 minutes. When we landed, everyone cheered. We knew each other’s names. Many people had exchanged numbers. I know a handful had plans to carpool.
At the end of that trip, I was talking to my roommate (also a flight attendant) and mentioned the 1.5 hour onboard delay. He said “God, that must have sucked.” He was shocked when I said it really, really didn’t.
I always hire my guests to help me with ‘chores’ (if they’re willing!), the kind of task that’s fun at first but less fun when you have to keep going for hours (burning all the broom bushes in the pasture, picking many kg of berries to make syrup, carrying a mountain of logs into the wood shed and building stable log piles so they don’t come cascading down later…) And every time I’m amazed by the way humans can make the most tedious tasks genuinely fun through… group dynamics? just the way people start interacting and bonding with each other when everyone is focused on the same repetitive physical activity. It’s hard to find examples because it’s always so specific to each situation; but I mean things like
people spontaneously specialising and developing a feeling of expertise and pride in their subtrade, no matter how silly (putting away firewood involved one Log Selecter outside going back and forth delivering logs to two Pile Builders who piled them up in the shed, and each rapidly created their own well-oiled System and became convinced it would be hard to replace them now that they had mastered their craft)
new vocabulary being coined and immediately adopted (the Pile Builders came up with nicknames for logs of different lengths and shapes so they could ‘order’ them from the Log Selecter more efficiently—”I’ve got a One-Armed Bandit here, I need another one to fit next to it, but with an ‘arm’ on the other side” “Here” “The arm is on the same side!” “Just turn it around and the arm will be on the other side”)
songs emerging almost by themselves (a song about fishing mussels was repurposed into a song about picking plums; a whole new song was invented to encourage weirdly-shaped logs to fit in with the others as we tried to fill all the gaps)
stories being told. Weaving a trivial task into a complex imaginary plot and context to make it more entertaining and meaningful
the extremely human compulsion to write down our knowledge to share it with future generations (I was told to take note of the best & quickest knot to tie up foliage when making tree hay, for the benefit of whoever does it next summer)
beliefs as to the Right Way To Do Things quickly solidifying into myths or superstitions, as we forget what drove us to do things this way in the first place, but trust that we had good reasons so now it’s the Way It’s Done
I always tell people to help only if they feel like it and we can stop anytime and I’ll finish later by myself, but what usually happens instead is that they want to come back at the same time next year to do this exact chore again because of how they’ve made it theirs in just a few days (or in one afternoon!) Give a group of humans a banal task and while they’re at it they will come up with a whole new inside slang, a few work songs and a handful of founding texts and myths, until it feels special and important. I love seeing the way these miniature folklores just emanate from people doing things together.
When I was younger and more abled, I was so fucking on board with the fantasy genre’s subversion of traditional femininity. We weren’t just fainting maidens locked up in towers; we could do anything men could do, be as strong or as physical or as violent. I got into western martial arts and learned to fight with a rapier, fell in love with the longsword.
But since I’ve gotten too disabled to fight anymore, I… find myself coming back to that maiden in a tower. It’s that funny thing, where subverting femininity is powerful for the people who have always been forced into it… but for the people who have always been excluded, the powerful thing can be embracing it.
As I’m disabled, as I say to groups of friends, “I can’t walk that far,” as I’m in too much pain to keep partying, I find myself worrying: I’m boring, too quiet, too stationary, irrelevant. The message sent to the disabled is: You’re out of the narrative, you’re secondary, you’re a burden.
The remarkable thing about the maiden in her tower is not her immobility; it’s common for disabled people to be abandoned, set adrift, waiting at bus stops or watching out the windows, forgotten in institutions or stranded in our houses. The remarkable thing is that she’s like a beacon, turning her tower into a lighthouse; people want to come to her, she’s important, she inspires through her appearance and words and craftwork. In medieval romances she gives gifts, write letters, sends messengers, and summons lovers; she plays chess, commissions ballads, composes music, commands knights. She is her household’s moral centre in a castle under siege. She is a castle unto herself, and the integrity of her body matters.
That can be so revolutionary to those of us stuck in our towers who fall prey to thinking: Nobody would want to visit; nobody would want to listen; nobody would want to stay.
It’s been half a decade and I still haven’t found an articulation of the complexity of “representation” as concisely and precisely mindblowing as @hungrylikethewolfie’s here.
My favorite arc in LotR is actually “Gandalf & Pippin’s Questions.”
The core of this relationship is that Pippin likes asking questions and Gandalf only sometimes has the leisure to answer them:
‘What are you going to do then?’ asked Pippin, undaunted by the wizard’s bristling brows.
‘Knock on the doors with your head, Peregrin Took,’ said Gandalf. ‘But if that does not shatter them, and I am allowed a little peace from foolish questions, I will seek for the opening words.’
(“Undaunted” is such a good word for Pippin re: Gandalf. He’s clearly never feared an authority figure in his life. Meanwhile, Gandalf is like “Pippin is a good kid but if someone doesn’t squelch him when necessary he’s going to do something REALLY stupid.”)
Later, the continuing saga of “Gandalf doesn’t like unnecessary questions” returns as soon as he does:
'Then Gandalf came back to us, and he seemed relieved, almost merry. He did say he was glad to see us, then.
’"But Gandalf,“ I cried, “where have you been? And have you seen the others?’
’"Wherever I have been, I am back,” he answered in the genuine Gandalf manner. “Yes, I have seen some of the others. But news must wait.”’
Note Pippin’s tolerant familiarity with “Gandalf giving useless answers.”
After Isengard and Pippin’s first sight of the palantir, we see its influence showing itself in Pippin’s stronger and angrier irritation at Gandalf’s uncommunicative ways:
'You had the luck, Merry,’ said Pippin softly, after a long pause. 'You were riding with Gandalf.’
'Well, what of it?’
'Did you get any news, any information out of him?’
'Yes, a good deal. More than usual. (…) But you can go with him tomorrow, if you think you can get more out of him–and if he’ll let you.’
'Can I? Good! But he’s close, isn’t he? Not changed at all.’
'Oh yes, he is!’ said Merry, waking up a little (…)
'Well, if Gandalf has changed at all, then he’s closer than ever that’s all,’ Pippin argued.
We all know how that ends. Boy steals rock, boy looks into rock, boy gets his mind filleted by the Enemy, Gandalf evacuates with him to Minas Tirith.
But then! While Gandalf is quite clear that Pippin should have known better/talked to him before resorting to stealing (and he’s right, obviously), he also responds to this incident by changing his own behavior. He starts talkingmore.
'What did the men of old use [the palantiri] for?’ asked Pippin, delighted and astonished at getting answers to so many questions, and wondering how long it would last.
And he seems to make it clear that this IS in response to the palantir incident, and is him attempting to take Pippin’s desire for information more seriously.
'But I should like to know–’ Pippin began.
'Mercy!’ cried Gandalf. 'If the giving of information is to be the cure of your inquisitiveness, I shall spend all the rest of my days in answering you. What more do you want to know?’
'The names of all the stars, and of all living things, and the whole history of Middle-earth and Over-heaven and of the Sundering Seas,’ laughed Pippin. 'Of course! What less? But I am not in a hurry tonight. At the moment I was just wondering about the black shadow.’
(I love that Pippin laughs and says “If I have the option, I want to know everything, obviously,” partly because he’s making a joke so soon after that nightmare incident and partly because it’s the first time we see Pippin expressing a desire for real, comprehensive knowledge. Even if it’s a joke, this is also the point in the narrative where—having lost both Merry and Frodo—Pippin’s horizons start being forcibly widened, and we’re about to see him taking in an unfamiliar world by himself.)
Despite Gandalf’s “How much more do I have to say?” protest, Gandalf keeps talking and telling his passenger stories, even when Pippin’s falling asleep. <3
Pippin became drowsy again and paid little attention to Gandalf telling him of the customs of Gondor, and how the Lord of the City had beacons built on the tops of outlying hills along both borders of the great range, and maintained posts at these points where fresh horses were always in readiness to bear his errand-riders to Rohan in the North, or to Belfalas in the South.
After we get to Minas Tirith, they both have less time and less peace, but we still get a glimpse of Gandalf trying to balance Pippin’s questions with his other, weightier duties:
'There are evil days ahead. To sleep while we may!’
'But,’ said Pippin.
'But what?’ said Gandalf. 'Only one but will I allow tonight.’
(I don’t remember the exact question, but it was after they’d seen Faramir, and Pippin was disturbed by the fact that Frodo and Sam were traveling with Gollum. He wanted Gandalf to give an explanation, which Gandalf didn’t really have.)
Finally, two notes on the subject after the destruction of the Ring. Firstly, there’s this exchange when Frodo and Sam are first reunited with Merry and Pippin in their knightly armors:
'But I can see there’s more tales to tell than ours.’
'There are indeed,’ said Pippin turning toward him. 'And we’ll begin telling them, as soon as this feast is ended. In the meantime you can try Gandalf. He’s not as close as he used to be, though he laughs now more than he talks.’
And later in Minas Tirith (when Aragorn is keeping them around for his wedding, but he and Gandalf both refuse to tell them that’s why) Frodo teasingly recalls that line.
'Pippin,’ said Frodo, 'didn’t you say that Gandalf was less close than of old? He was weary of his labors then, I think. Now he is recovering.’
(Frodo, of course, also has a great deal of experience in “Gandalf not answering your questions even when he thinks he IS.”)
I don’t really have a point to this, I just love the shift in Gandalf & Pippin’s relationship over the course of the books, and I also love the change from Pippin’s sulky “if Gandalf has changed at all, then he’s closer than ever >:/” to his merry, affectionate “He’s not as close now as he used to be, though he laughs now more than he talks.”
Honestly you don’t even have to change the genre much. Guy probably went through quite the ordeal because of all the people trying to get to Indy.
Day 1: “Professor Jones, hate to bother you but there’s an assassin trying to kill me, do you have…yes I see it…*gunshots* just to make sure, is there any paperwork I can file or should I just call the police?”
Day 85: “Oh fucking try me, I have 84 papers to grade because that lazy asshole went off to fucking Burma in the middle of fucking finals week, if you don’t leave right the fuck now I will awaken that ancient artifact in the corner and turn your intestines into fucking snakes.”
also, don’t forget: the movies are set in the 1930s-50s
so please imagine this 20-year-old girl who’s had to practically fight god to convince everyone that, no, she would NOT be happier with a degree in home economics and yes, she DOES want to be an archaeologist. she’s had to deal with male grad students trying to steal her research and constant patronizing questions about whether she can really handle the dirt and insects out in the field. even Indy, who stands up for her when the department leadership tries to pull Some Bullshit, sometimes treats her like a glorified secretary just out of habit
when the bad guys show up, they are therefore faced with a young woman who exists in a permanent state of simmering rage. she has a sensible wool skirt and practical oxfords and a baseball bat and you can fuck right off if you’re trying to pull this nonsense right after one of her professors just called her “sweetie” for the dozenth time
Okay idk if the timing and logistics match up at all but i just have a fever thought that his TA is none other than Mrs Evelyn O’Connell. Just think about it.
Jones: Are you sure you’re up for this position?
Evie: Dr Jones I assure you that despite being a woman I-
Jones: No no it’s not that, it’s just that there’s a lot of… weird artifacts that come through my door
Evie: Oh, well I actually have some experience with weird
Jones: and sometimes it can get dangerous…
Evie *smiling*: I can handle that as well
(Later in the school year, during a shoot out)
Jones: You weren’t kidding! *gunshots*
Evie pulling out a grenade and chucks it: These ruffians aren’t half as bad Imhotep, and he was nothing compared to midterms *explosion*
Evie: Oh dear they seem to have brought more friends. Pass me my bag Professor Jones if you’d please.
Jones: Sure Evie *hands her the bag*
Evie: *pulls out an old fashion pistol with a large bell*
Jones: I don’t think that’s going to be enough.
Evie: Oh it’s not. I’m phoning my husband *fires a flare through the window*
Jones: I doubt stiff upper lip gent is going to help us right now Evie.
Evie: I whole heartedly agree Professor Jones.
*A moment later Rick crashes the car through the wall and pulls out a tommy gun. He screams at the top of his lungs as he rushes the bad guys*
Evie: Luckily my husband is American.
This continued to get better and better as I went.
Anyway this is your reminder to STOP BUYING SMART DEVICES THAT AREN’T NECESSARY.
Your soap does not need to connect to the internet. Your fridge does not need to be able to track the temperature in other countries. Your stove shouldn’t talk to you
This is not “technology bad” this is “these corporations are tracking you and your movements at ALL TIMES OF THE DAY.” They know your every move down to when you wash your hands after you take a shit. Alexa and Siri were the first introduction to this, and once people got used to them on their phones, they put them in their own little gadgets for your house.
And then they connected those gadgets to the lights. To the doors. To the window locks. To the thermostat.
You should be TERRIFIED at how many things are becoming “smart” these days. It’s yet another way for companies to sell to you, and, in a worst case scenario, it can be the thing that puts you in harms way.
Imagine you’re running a little late on your electric bill, and your fridge is a “smart” fridge. And because you’re running late on your payment they just….lock your fridge. Not shut the electricity off. Lock your fridge. Because fridges can now be locked remotely. You can no longer access your food until you pay them.
Cops want to know if you’ve been to any protests recently? They can track that handy dandy smart watch you decided to wear, even though you left your phone in the car. They can tell if you were home all day or lying.
Abusive partner or family member? They can shut off your support systems everywhere. Decide when you get to eat, if you do. Decide how hot or cold the house should be to make you suffer. Turn off the oven in the middle of you cooking dinner bc you upset them. Lock you in. Lock you out.
Your appliances, your LIFE, should not be surrounded by smart tech. Buy normal clocks. Get normal soap dispensers. Keep a pen and paper on the fridge to write down your grocery list. Set a manual timer for the oven. Wear a normal watch that only tells time. Get a step counter that clips to your belt.
Phone, laptop, TV. Those are the only things that make sense being “smart.” Everything else is one step closer to a dystopian novel that you don’t want to be in.
Your phone already tracks your every step. Don’t give every other thing in your life that ability.
And here’s the thing! It’s not only something that can cause you problems if you’re late to pay bills or have abusive partners/family or are doing something the government may not take kindly to!
Let’s say, hypothetically, you do literally nothing. Well, turns out there’s a bug in the fridge software that sets the temperature to 60 degrees when it receives some unexpected input from your fridge app. Or the manufacturer pushes out an involuntary fridge update and now, while the update is downloading, sorry! your the fridge doesn’t open until the update is done.
And these are only the issues that affect you. Generally, Smart Device manufacturers do not think for even one second about the security of their devices. So, this means that hackers will see well known and publicized security holes that have been easily available for literal years but the manufacturer is simply too lazy to fix, use those holes to get into devices, and use those devices as bots to attack whoever they please (and, as a bonus, it look like it’s coming from your home!)
You’d think that this sounds like something out of a horror movie but this is the reality we live in RIGHT NOW. Many of the largest botnets (e.g. the Mirai botnet) in the world consist largely of compromised smart/IoT (internet of things) devices.
So uh just give it some thought before you buy the SmartChair3000 – it’s probably not as cool as it sounds :P
Mockumentary set in medieval England with no explanation as to why or how a camera crew is there
A lot of people have mentioned monty python and the holy grail on this post which is accurate but I was envisioning more of a the office/what we do in the shadows type sitcom complete with talking heads and will-they-or-won’t-theys and with the technology that allows the mockumentary genre to exist going completely unquestioned by the entire cast despise it not occurring anywhere else in the otherwise realistically portrayed setting
…hang on, I think there’s a workable premise here.
The camera crew is a team of time-traveling scientists, studying an isolated village. They don’t bother trying to blend in with the locals much, because they know the village will be wiped out by plague in a few years and no trace of their expedition survives in the historical record. The villagers think they’re wealthy-but-eccentric travelers from a distant land, and they’ve bought off the local lord, a minor knight who doesn’t pay much attention to his serfs anyway.
The scientists are jaded. They’ve all been on multiple expeditions to doomed communities, and they’ve learned not to get too attached to their subjects. Part of the mockumentary format includes their video diaries, internal squabbles, and personality conflicts. The rest is interviews with the locals, footage of the crew tagging along with them in their daily lives, and the various experiments members of the crew are running.
(Most of their research is innocuous: water and soil samples, collecting plant and animal specimens to restore future biodiversity, measuring linguistic drift. All their planned human-subject research had to pass an ethics review board.)
(That said, sometimes opportunities for impromptu data collection arise. And sometimes you get bored and want to know what would happen if you projected a 40-foot holographic cow on the road outside the village.)
(The time travel science ethics review board has very clear rules about starting cults: no matter how funny you think it would be, don’t.)
The tone of the show is pitch-black comedy, at least to start with. The crew is burned out and cynical, the villagers are poor and underfed and overworked. Nobody’s doing their best work, or even trying to, really. This is a team that couldn’t get better, sexier, more exciting assignments, and a village full of people whose idea of a better future is a harvest that fails less than last year’s.
But over the course of, say, three seasons — not quite as long as it’s going to take for the plague to arrive — the research team does something they’re really not supposed to do. They get invested. They start to care, a little. They give the villagers a tiny bit of help, here and there — and they’re shocked to see just how much the villagers manage to do with that help.
But the villagers are still doomed, even if they’re clever and curious and likable. Even if a few of them are smart enough to figure out that the research crew aren’t just weird rich foreigners. Even if letting them all die is starting to feel like a waste, or even a crime.
There’s nothing they can do about it. History is very clear about the village’s fate, and they can’t change history.
Right?
ooh ooh okay. the cold open for every episode (the equivalent to B99’s morning meeting cold opens) is the expedition leader going over a video message from her future self. like just a day or two in the future. usually it’s nothing big, just letting her know about any events in the village that they should try to get recordings of, and warning her about any new bullshit her underlings are going to try to get away with.
in theory she would also get warned away from any actions that could negatively impact the timeline, but this is an extremely low-stakes, low-prestige assignment. everyone with actual career prospects is fighting tooth and nail for the sexy assignments, like pre- volcano Pompeii or Yellowstone. nothing her team can do here really matters, so she never gets warned about anything major.
until sweeps week, probably.
some fun running gags:
the scientists always say decades without specifying the century, leading to constant misunderstandings
“hey it could be worse, we could have been stuck in the 20s”
“what are you talking about? the 1920s are a dream assignment compared to this!”
“oh lol no I meant the 2020s, my bad”
“you know what I miss? live music. when I was stationed in the 90s I got to go to so many concerts”
“no shit? oh man did you get to see Nirvana live, that would rule”
“no but I did see The Magic Flute in Vienna! with Mozart conducting!”
additional running gag: the show starts when the team has already been on site for a while, so most of the villagers are already pretty blasé about seeing future technology. BUT there is one villager who just. always loses her shit, every time. without fail. just full on “BACK, foul creature!!!! WHAT is this FIENDISH SORCERY you wield????” while her neighbors are like “okay calm your tits Maud, they do this every tuesday and it’s fine”
running gag that i am unashamedly stealing from star trek: constant references to events and cultural figures from future history (ie the period between now and when the scientists come from). also it’s never clear, based on the scientists’ offhand references to their childhoods and home lives, whether their future society is a blissful utopia or a very weird dystopia.
running gag with eventual payoff: there are two small and very grubby village children who like to follow the crew around. they never speak. we get lots of reaction shots of the two of them staring blankly at whatever nonsense just happened.
after at least two years of this, a member of the crew is trying to fix a piece of equipment and having no success. the two small children wander into frame (as they often do) and the scientist ignores them (as he usually does)
only this time, the smaller and grubbier child wordlessly pulls a tool out of the scientist’s toolbox and hands it to the larger and slightly less grubby child, who fixes the problem and hands the tool back to the (now dumbfounded) scientist. they walk away, still silent. now it’s the scientist’s turn to stare blankly into the camera.
for maximum comedy the expedition head should be verging on Michael Scott levels of obliviousness. just floating along in a bubble of reassurance from her future self that there’s nothing to worry about.
the cold open is like “good news! the supply drop will go smoothly, no hiccups” and then in the episode we see that their supplies from the future, which were supposed to be teleported to an uninhabited clearing in the woods, landed in the village square in front of the church. on a sunday. and the villagers opened the crates and walked off with a bunch of future tech that the crew now has to hunt down and reclaim.
and they tell their boss none of this, so when she goes to record her message for her past self at the end of the episode she can be like “good news! ” and carry on living her life with the serene confidence of someone who believes in horoscopes and also gets to write her own horoscopes, because her staff makes sure she never knows about their constant fuckups and eleventh-hour saves.
ANYWAY you cannot convince me that the air nomads didn’t have any sort of trade good based on the flying bison and aang just didn’t have the time or safety to make and sell any of these while trying to stop ozai. they probably did so much spinning just because drop spindles are super transportable, it’s something to do while flying long distances, there’s always a weaver somewhere willing to buy yarn, and there’s always, always large amounts of shed fur just. around. look at how much came off of appa that one episode. so much fur
so three things happen the summer after ozai is defeated and appa starts shedding in earnest again
aang starts spinning and selling yarn because that’s What You Do and he’s clinging REAL HARD to every possible air nomad tradition because, well, who else will remember these things?
toph hears about this and scruffs him before he can sell too much because she’s a merchants daughter and holy shit aang do you understand what you’re selling?? yarn from the last known sky bison! the avatar’s own spirit guide!! spun by the avatars own hand!!!! what are you doing aang!!!!!! she has to drag katara in at this point because aang is real unhappy with the idea that his normal flying bison yarn of, uh, questionable quality is being sold to exclusive high class weavers so they can make shawls for filthy rich nobles for baaaaaank just on the basis of his name. this isn’t how the monks did it :/ and he doesn’t WANT a lot of money anyway! he’s a monk!! he only asks for what he needs to survive!! anyway katara manages to talk toph around to donating most of the money to reconstruction efforts, charities, and orphanages and convinces aang that having an emergency fund is a good thing and he should keep something.aang accidentally ends up with a reasonably full bank account and is really confused about how that happened, why it’s there, and what he’s supposed to do with it
there is a real weird period of time where it’s In Fashion for high noble ladies to have shawls and scarves dyed the same color as aangs clothes (because that’s how you know it’s made with special avatar yarn!) or have images of appa woven into them (can you imagine a shawl that’s just a full length body shot of appa?? amazing) and all the earth kingdom nobility are just rocking green and orange like nbd. weaving decorative shawls with slubby yarn becomes really in fashion, too, because aang is not great at spinning. he’s 13 and it’s boring, ok?
BONUS sokka is just. so mad. you could have been making bank with appa the whole time we were scrambling around the planet aang? do you realize how much more food we could have had? how many more hot baths?? how could you betray me like this
(probably the air nomads also did a lot of weaving but it was mostly the pregnant nuns and the really old nomads so it’s a little off aangs radar. and does aang eat cheese? it never comes up in series but I would also believe that the nomads made a lot of air bison cheese and bison butter tea)
headcanon accepted re: sky bison products
you said SPINNING on a DROP SPINDLE and i instantly went YES. OH GOD YES.
i bet sky bison yarn is really strong but probably not super soft - we see in the show that the fibers are really long, which lends itself well to strong yarns that can stand up to a lot of wear and tear (silk yarn is INCREDIBLE when it comes to being hard-wearing, and that’s mostly because silk is basically an INFINITELY LONG FIBER). But becauseit’s so long and comes from such a large animal, it’s probably really coarse and thick.
I’m imagining most of those high-class ladies would be wearing at least one layer underneath their shawls, because bison yarn is probably pretty itchy if you’re used to high quality wool, silk, or fine linen. Especially bison yarn spun by a 13yo who doesn’t really like spinning.
unless of course the air nomads bred their bison specifically for soft fur, but generally when you’re breeding for stuff like that, you need different breeds for different purposes. appa’s pretty clearly a long-distance riding bison, which would probably have been a different breed than whichever ones would have been bred for soft fur. most species of domesticated animal that are dual+ purpose (i.e. meat/milk/wool/transportation) have breeds that can only do one or two of those well, and the others not as great.
the air nomads obviously would not have been breeding for meat, because vegetarians. For long distance travel and a nomadic lifestyle I bet they would have wanted a travel/milk dual purpose breed, but because they can regulate their body temperature with airbending, soft warm yarn might not have been a high priority for that breed.
which is a lot of words to say “appa-fur yarn is ITCHY”
My impression is that the sky bisons aren’t actually domesticated, so much as semi-sentient and choosing to partner with the air nomads, so I don’t think they’d be bred for anything, much less soft hair.
I actually headcanon spinning as something air nomad kids would be taught to do from a young age to burn off energy and stress and make it easier for them to learn to meditate, so I think Aang would probably be decent at making yarn that’s evenly spun, but probably wouldn’t have the experience to make super fine thread.
I would assume that appa has a double layer coat like most high altitude herd animals, so even without selective breeding the insulating inner layer would probably be suuuper soft. just look up qiviut for an idea of how soft and expensive muskox fur can get, and the skeins of bison fur yarn I have aren’t noticeably different from something like alpaca. assuming that appa sheds a proportionate amount of undercoat to muskox or bison (up to seven pounds a year) there is going to be a LOT of snuggly undercoat to turn into snuggly Soft Things
and I’ve seen a couple people say that aang would probably have learned spinning pretty young and be fairly competent at it, and I agree! I def meant the questionable yarn quality to be a statement on his attention span and post-war schedule, not skill (I don’t really know how to spin so idk if constantly starting and stopping and not paying any attention anyway would effect the consistency any? it just Felt Right)
I’ve never spun anything like qiviut - the most exotic thing I’ve spun is alpaca, unless folks think silk is more exotic - so I didn’t think about the double coat! Don’t they usually need special treatment to separate the topcoat from the undercoat, tho? I wouldn’t be surprised if Aang either didn’t know or wasn’t very good at separating from them.
I *do* spin on a drop spindle, tho, and the biggest problem with stopping and starting often is keeping the single the same width, but you have the same problem stopping and starting ANY kind of spinning project. In some ways, a drop spindle makes it easier to control that than a regular spinning wheel - you have a lot more control over the fiber and the yarn you’re spinning, so you can be more precise. My drop spindle yarns tend to be very regular and compact, while my spinning wheel yarns are more varied and lofty.
However, now I’m picturing the moment when you spin your single a little too thin, and the drop spindle lives up to its name - from hundreds or even thousands of feet in the air! Plummetting off the side of the air bison, with the older nomads scrambling to catch it…
I can totally imagine that the air nomads hat special spindles with gliders (like his stick where he glides with) to spin with airbending as a practice for beginner benders, or in a similar stile as the hand spinning wheels from India, but for air nomads!
And wouldn’t the process from start to finish be a good lesson in great fullness? Like how long it takes from baby bison to clothes
Maby even a live milestone. From first bison who chosen you to your first own robe/Stola??
It could even be that the Air Nomad’s robes were MADE out of sky bison fur, if the under coat was a) incredibly soft (I bet they’d wear the over coat too just because they didn’t really care about worldly possessions and comfortability) and b) their only farm animal was the sky bison. That’s what the Air Nomad’s wear, is Sky bison wool clothes.
Also, to the person who said Sky Bisons would only shed about seven pounds a year, I would like to counter that idea with the fact that Appa is GARGANTUAN. He has enough room on his saddle to carry literally six or seven children and their equipment on his back without much complaint, of which these children are not too much smaller than adults. An ox or an Alpaca or a normal Bison are tiny compared to Appa.
Appa’d have a metric butt ton of under fur on his body. I’d say about twenty to thirty pounds of under fur, with more on top, at the very least.
ok so I didn’t know that supported spindles existed and YES, very much yes to those. I love that.
I was actually trying to say that if muskox shed seven pounds we could use that to extrapolate how much appa shed if he shed proportionate to his size, not that appa would only shed seven pounds
ok, adhd rabbit hole time because I just looked up the average size of muskoxen and the approximate size of appa and, uh. apparently muskoxen are 900lbs full grown and appa is ten tons. over TWENTY TIMES THE SIZE OF A MUSKOX. obvs that’s doesn’t actually tell us anything about appas actual height and length but that’s the only solid number the show gives us and thirty pounds of underfur is starting to seem pretty conservative. it might be closer to 120lbs???
which is a weird way to say that I bet the air nomads had lots of crazy air powered spinning contraptions (and I’m still assuming that anything they had that wasn’t easily transportable was dealt with by pregnant nuns and aang wasn’t really introduced to it yet) and they just churned out textiles. literally everything fabric the nomads used was probably bison fur in some way because there was just. so. much. fur.
Textiles Tumblr coming in clutch to build the air nomad trade empire
