trying on a metaphor
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
Aqua Utopia|海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
Jules of Nature

❣ Chile in a Photography ❣

Kaledo Art

No title available
noise dept.
Sade Olutola
Peter Solarz
No title available
will byers stan first human second
tumblr dot com

pixel skylines

izzy's playlists!
Cosimo Galluzzi
macklin celebrini has autism
One Nice Bug Per Day
DEAR READER
occasionally subtle

seen from United States

seen from United States

seen from Canada

seen from United States

seen from United States
seen from Chile

seen from Germany

seen from Iraq

seen from Italy

seen from Uruguay

seen from Palestinian Territories
seen from Palestinian Territories

seen from Malaysia
seen from Chile
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
@sudsyjellyfish
Providing references for a job application is a terrible humiliation ritual. What do you mean I have to reach out to people I haven’t spoken to in multiple years and ask them to do a favor for me???
when the weird relative shows up to the farm
i have never seen an animal moving this silly
Okay, so. Star Wars has all these concepts that weirdo New Left boomer George Lucas tosses in there but because of storyteller limitations it would kill the plot to fully explain them all, so later writers have to come in for the spin-off materials and bat clean-up to fully explain all this crazy crap. And I would like to talk about something that made me actively angry at first, but which I now adore. And that is the Naboo.
So much about Naboo culture is infuriating from a logical standpoint. They have a queen, okay. A constitutionally elected queen? Weird, okay. Don't know why they'd do that but... She's FOURTEEN? Excuse me? Is it a ceremonial thing or, oh no it's not? Legit head of state? Why does she dress like that? Why does she talk like that? I'm so tired.
Here's the explainer. Let me go cook.
There's this joke in Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy where the last living human goes back in time and finds out humans aren't actually from Earth, but an alien culture that tricked all the middle managers, pedantic weirdos, and other infuriating folk into getting in a space arc which they gave the wrong evacuation coordinates to simply get rid of them. The Naboo are like this but they're all artists and poets and hippies, but like classy ones. They fled their home planet during a war and crash landed on Naboo, then did a colonism to the Gungans because, hey, they were fleeing a war and it was do or die. This spiritual rot in their creation story is later rectified by Padmé. But it's super important to their cultural psychology. They're hippies, but will subjugate if needed. They are "peaceful" but I guarantee you every single one of them has a tiny extremely shiny pistol up their sleeve and they will draw down on you if backed against a wall.
The scene that I think says it all is at the end of Phantom Menace when Padmé is surrounded by Nute Gunray and his droids, they've got her dead to rights, but Sabé her double creates a distraction so the queen can make it to her throne. This one piece of furniture is the Naboo in a nutshell. It's richly carved with artistic details, it has two seats to the side so the queen's handmaidens can read the lips of people in the back of the room and use hand signals to communicate with the queen while she can remain focused mostly on who is speaking to her. It is hundreds of years old. And it has a secret compartment in the armrest that is FULL OF GUNS. Layers of artistic opulence hiding their true intentions.
The Naboo were created to be backwards compatible with Princess Leia. They're compassionate pacifists, but they will shot you if needed.
Why do they elect teenage royalty? It's a little creepy. It's giving "age of consent is emotional maturity". It makes no sense.
The explanation they give outsiders is they want youthful idealism untainted by cynicism. What they don't tell you is that they take kids with stated interest in politics and put them in an advanced highly competitive Leadership Academy which is like Model UN mixed with Battle Royale. Well, they don't kill each other but it's intense. It's like what the clones went though just all diplomacy training and tea ceremonies all the time. Which is crazy but so Naboo.
Oh, and all the delegates for the royalty election run using pseudonyms for security. Imagine voting for the head of state but you can't run a background check. It's so crazy.
Why does Padmé dress like that? Well, fashion is one of Naboo's major industries so it's like she's wearing the entire Fall line catalog at once. To advertise not only the talent of her people, but to show how much they favor her. BUT that dress has multiple layers of padding and resin armor. And aforementioned spots for those little silver blasters. And it breaks up her silhouette making her harder to shoot. And it's so elaborate you pay more attention to the crazy dress and not if the person wearing it is really the queen or a decoy. Everything about Naboo is like this.
Queen Amidala has that weird accent while Padmé does not. Because all her handmaidens helped create the accent together so they all can imitate it. It's like if you gave girls at a rowdy sleepover the job of federal counterintelligence. That's what they came up with.
The handmaidens wear colorful identical clothes so you can't tell them apart, hoods to partially conceal their identity, and they don't wear the queen's fancy makeup. So one of them can be the queen and spy on people in the audience. Because the Naboo don't trust shit for shit.
Their public face is so silly to hide all the truly weird shit they do behind the scenes.
They use their reputation as artist hippies to conceal multiple layers of subterfuge and disguise their methods of self defense and assuage their paranoia due to wartime trauma and their disturbing colonial past. All of them are completely off their rocker even by Star Wars standards. And I love them so much. They put on a show so everyone thinks they have them figured out but what they have going on is far more weirder and more sinister than meets the eye. You know how catty, neurotic, and competitive art school students stereotypically are? Yeah, planet art student. Love them!
There you go, @charmwasjess
honestly this goes further than anything else to explain why padme heard this bonkers greasy teenage anakin confess to her that he wiped out the entire village of native people who killed his mother, and padme (ostensibly our conscience) (actually a valedictorian of the naboo political school of move fast break things and look gorgeous doing it) was just like '👍'
also Darth Sidious is from there, too, so you can interpret him as to some extent the intersection point of everything weird about the Naboo and, uh, everything about the Sith.
like...a planet destroying laser is pretty Sith Lord, and having a Galactic Empire is classically Sith, but faking your way into being Emperor via elaborate indirect election fraud and a whole faked-up proxy war, and mounting your hyperspace-capable space laser on a deeply gratuitous whole-ass artificial moon? there's distinct traces of Naboo aesthetic sensibility showing through there.
also he hates his home planet, which we may assume is why after becoming emperor and having no more reason to please anybody but himself, he wore nothing but an ankle-length hoodie for twenty-five years.
Would love to shut off the part of my brain that does the visceral horror response to seeing bugs. I’m consciously trying so hard to let them be, but subconsciously there are seven alarms going off
put that boy in a situation
more mourning doves
Kibori Nicola, Big Plump Pigeon
love is stored in the kitty cat
commissions open | info
Baby pigeon mystery!
Mailing list | Patreon
ghost cover doodles
I think the most hilarious place to put Post-Canon Sokka would have been the university at Ba Sing Se. I think he would have made a great unhinged professor. Also, in true Sokka fashion, he should have completely dodged fame. Momo is more famous than he is.
He wants to demonstrate to the class how this thing called electricity works, so he's going to be bringing in a Firebender, so everybody be cool, we're all friends here... and in walks Princess Azula of the Fire Nation. One-time conqueror of the city. One of the students is currently writing an essay on how her brief rule of the city affected fruit trade. She says she considers the class to still be her subjects as she doesn't acknowledge any pretenders to any of her thrones, but for now you're exempted from bowing and "Your Highness" will do. It's a really interesting lecture.
"Okay, guys - hey, listen up, everyone - I won't be here next week, me and Aang are going to-" yeah right, sure, Professor Sokka knows the Avatar. Except, of course, the Avatar walks in sheepishly and says that Appa might have gotten into Sokka's hybrid crops, and then you all have to sit there and watch your professor chase the Avatar around with a sword.
One postgrad student is specializing in Water Tribe Cultures. She's currently studying the massive cultural shift that happened in the Northern Water Tribe at the end of the war - oh, and Professor, I absolutely know that you're from the Southern Water Tribe, but it's just that the shift started with Master Katara, and of course I don't think that every person from the South knows one another haha it's just that I need to ask her some questions and I thought maybe you could help me write a letter or write a letter of introduction or...
Sokka looks at her blankly and goes "yeah, she's my sister. KATARA!" which is followed by a faint answering "fuck you!" from Somewhere and to the horror/elation of our postgrad, Master Katara bursts in and is promptly beaned in the head with a rock by Professor Sokka. Her brother. her hero and her professor are siblings and currently brawling on the floor.
The 300 level poli-sci final exam at Ba Song Se University is infamous for the airship question. It's an essay question, worth a whole 10 points on a 60 point exam, asking for the primary influences that led to airship technology no longer being used for military purposes after its initial introduction by the Fire Nation during the day of the comet. No matter how the rest of the test changes it's always on the exam, and no one ever gets more than 9/10 on it. Doesn't matter how thorough your knowledge, how compelling and in-depth your essay, how many brilliantly sourced paragraphs you manage to frantically scratch out before the exam period ends. Nine out of ten, never more, with exactly one exception.
Professor Sokka.
Apparently he audited the course when he was originally a student at the university, a few years after the war, and submitted the only response to ever get a perfect score on the airship question during the first year it was included in the exam.
On a dare, you ask if he still has his exam so you can see his record holding essay, and to your surprise he does and he obliges. It's five words long, but only if you include the source as well.
Indicate the primary cause(s) that prevented the pursuit of military airship technology after the hundred year war, with sources. (10 points)
"AIRSHIP SLICE!!" (1)
(1) I was there.
Okay this isn't staying hidden in the tags. A+ addition
Okay this isn’t
staying hidden in the tags.
A+ addition
Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.
I 🧡 robot divorce
the robots are back together and are making a baby
oh my god I forgot some characters had alien implants in the back of their necks there... will I ever be free
says a person who has a cute pet name for it too
Pigeon Party 🕊 Pigeon prints here!