So my brother and I were just talking on the phone and we realized: Aang might have mastered all four elements but Sokka mastered the non-bending styles from all four nations!
He already knew how to fight with Water Tribe weapons/regalia:
Then, in what’s likely the first Earth Kingdom village he’s ever visited, he learned how to fight with the Warriors of Kyoshi:
When he reached the Northern Air Temple, he was able to tap into the philosophy of the airbenders and realize that the best way to win a battle is to avoid face-to-face confrontation by instead using creative means (and the sky) to take down your opponent:
And finally, when he reached the Fire Nation, Piandao taught him how to forge a unique weapon and hone his swordsmanship:
Sokka learned all four non-bending styles!
Really puts Iroh’s quote into a different context:
“Understanding the other nations will help you become whole.”
i learned about Marion Stokes, a Philadelphia woman who began taping whatever was on television in 1979 and didn’t stop until her death in 2012.. The 71,000 VHS and Betamax tapes she made are the most complete collection preserving this era of TV. They are being digitized by the Internet Archive. (x)
i feel like this is selling her a bit short tbh. It’s not like she was a random woman who decided to tape ‘whatever’ was on television. She was a civil rights activist and archivist, who was extremely concerned about preserving history. She believed that, by taping television, she would be preserving history EXACTLY as it was perceived at the time; she didn’t want the detail in the news to disappear with time. And she was RIGHT.
Like I said, she didn’t just tape ‘whatever’ was on television. It was extremely targeted towards news stations. There were 8 VCRs running at all times in her home. Her life—-and her family’s lives—-were centered around 6 hour blocks, since that was the amount of time that a tape would record for. Her collections were also extremely organized.
When I was little I wanted to be Italian REALLT badly bc I loved the movie cars and specifically had a crush on this fucking THING
Which doesn’t speak English at all, all it’s line are in Italian and it’s name is GUIDO. And everyone knew I was obsessed with Italy in elementary school but they didn’t know why bc I, even as a young autistic child, had the sense to know this was a rightfully so, highly mockable thing. So I would read about cars on IMDB and then one day someone posted a crackfic on the message boards there and it was about this guy getting drunk and beating his wife, and it snapped me out of my fugue long enough to realize how absurd wanting to be Italian was, but then it made me cry really hard and my parents were like ‘hey what the fuck’ and I didn’t have the chutzpah to admit anything so I told them I saw a naked lady online and then they went into the computer and found all the weird south park midi songs I downloaded on lime wire and I thought they were literally going to kill me for about two weeks.
The reason I was downloading South Park episodes and songs on limewire and frostwire was because I was also obsessed with Kenny McCormick and for school we had to make a shitty little website about a world issue, so I found this free platform that doesn’t exist anymore but it was like a horrible little wix site from the mid aughts, and we based my groups theme on global warming. But when we were done with it I repurposed it as a perosnal site and lied about being a voluptuous blonde 19 year old woman who worked at a fictitious restaurant called the lunchbox, and I just wrote about how obsessed I was with Kenny McCormick and my sister found it and was like what the fuck is wrong with you. But she never told my parents. She also found this 80 page story I was writing about buddy the elf and all my weird skater ocs breaking into the moulin rouge, and at one point I was sick of buddy so I had a herd of buffalo trample him in the middle of a city and it was very tragic but jarring and unexpected. And she referenced a part of the story to me and it made me SO fucking paranoid that I wiped our entire, family shared packard bell computer and got in huge fucking trouble for it.
