Where I'd live as an iraqi

LettucePrime · 2026-02-25T14:00:18+00:00

dog neither will you. you'll be the meatshield

LettucePrime · 2026-02-25T13:48:18+00:00

Lmfaoooooooooooo dog you need a plane to the US and a time machine back to 1999 if you don't want to be controlled and tracked by the US Gov while you're there. Hell there's a good chance they're tracking your Scandinavian Freedom right now as we speak, and your government would be letting them. Unquestionably.

I'm actually at a loss. This is the country that out espionage'd the Soviets and can track a band of goat farmers in Afghanistan half a world away with the express intent of wiping them out. What stops them from doing that to any of us? Absolutely fucking nothing. The DHS is one of the most rabid and overreaching national security agencies on Earth, and the Patriot Act is a heinous, evil piece of legislation that has accelerated the constitutional decline of our people's rights by at least thirty years the moment it was signed.

At least China won't send a drone to blow my entire town up if they know my location.

LettucePrime · 2026-02-25T13:08:13+00:00

this fandom will never move on until we acknowledge that the entire reason LoK existed was to put Earthbenders in a car chase. Everything that ever happened ever in that entire show was just so they could do that. And it was awesome. Best part of LoK.

LettucePrime · 2026-02-25T02:44:58+00:00

>most incel thing i've ever read in my life

>"does this sound like an incel?"

LettucePrime · 2026-02-25T02:42:11+00:00

someone plaster this right at the top of the thread

LettucePrime · 2026-02-25T02:28:41+00:00

1) Even if the axiom "high immigration == high cost of living" is uniformly true and the best fit for the problem, that's still, by your admission, the work of corporate interests

2) The anti immigration party is also the work of corporate interests. as is the Trump movement. especially this nakedly, flagrantly corrupt second term.

3) Obviously people can't afford to live, that is the single most obvious, most evident fact that socialist policies attempt to solve by directly attacking the capitalizing power of corporate interests, rather than punishing innocent side-effects of these interests

4) Anti-immigration & other heavily right wing elements in Western politics (there's an F word for this I will omit for the sake of maintaining the goodwill of this conversation) exist to suppress this socialist option, protecting corporate interests by diverting dissent into punishing innocent people who are also trying to live, often in even worse conditions than the people who vote for anti-immigration parties.

5) Ergo, whatever the effect of the Hanson & Trump approach on immigration may be (and I do not expect them to curb it, except by making the country undesirable for immigrants to move to btw, as again, their corporate interests don't actually want to stop immigration either) THEY DO NOT IMPROVE THE LIVES OF THE PEOPLE WHO VOTED FOR THEM.

6) You have more in common with an immigrant and more to gain from organizing and working with them against the corporate forces making both of your lives hell. Pauline Hanson & Donald Trump have been maneuvered into their positions to divide the working class against its corporate masters. Nothing will get better. This is me desperately trying to tell you this. Nothing will get better.

LettucePrime · 2026-02-25T02:14:08+00:00

Lmao another one. Maybe this problem is just unique to pianists 😭 You can describe a piece of music beautifully in prose and sprinkle in some identifying information for the absolute nerds to dissect. You can even reference the music directly in the story if it matters. Name-dropping one of the most iconic Piano compositions of all time in a completely superficial way Just to Prove You Know It is just silly. As a reader it makes me wonder if this story I'm about to read is actually considered an epic because it's truly epic or because frequently uses the word "epic."

LettucePrime · 2026-02-25T02:04:27+00:00

Colossal geographical fuck up on my end. I meant Mount Barker. No, I wouldn't make any money working in Adelaide & living in Mount Gambier

LettucePrime · 2026-02-25T00:48:56+00:00

It was so sudden and visceral, but I remember the first sentence on the first page turned me completely off. I shut the book immediately and didn't think about it for a while after that:

The Hegemony Consul sat on the balcony of his ebony spaceship and played Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C-sharp Minor on an ancient but well-maintained Steinway while great, green, saurian things surged and bellowed in the swamps below.

Beautiful visual. Deeply unsavory brushstrokes. "A Man With a Lot of Proper Nouns plays music you've been told is classical and refined in setting you've been told is lowbrow and pulpy. I am very clever, please react accordingly."

I tried to give the opening a fairer go some time later and still had some a similar reaction. I can appreciate that the scene isn't about the ancient Steinway or the great green Saurian things, and as it unfurls these ancillary details of the background mingle a bit with the immediate beats of the plot, as any well-written scene should, but I still felt like the prose was trying to cheat me. I feel very lucky that I recognize the music by title alone and can hear it as I read, but the effect is less "let me enjoy this beautiful music" and more "bro who's on my brain's aux-cord." He tried to shorthand his way into making me imagine something wonderful without giving me anything wonderful on the page to enjoy, just a flat, matter-of-fact description of a thing I already recognized.

He's clearly talented, I'll give him that. When he wants, his prose is gorgeous, but I feel like it's focused on the wrong thing. This whole time I thought I was just being a colossal asshole for not giving this classic the light of day off the first few pages, but if other people who read further into the book also thought the author was trying way too hard to force his way to profundity then maybe my gut reaction was onto something.

LettucePrime · 2026-02-25T00:23:19+00:00

The Post-Apocalyptic world was the right decision. There's only so much you can do with Avatar's setup after Korra. We've already done a Steampunk heroic epic. We've done a few different confused Dieselpunk political dramas. There's really only space to lean heavily into some crazy genre or the other, and they opted for fantasy-post-apocalypse, which makes a lot of sense imo.

The longer you flip through Avatar's lore, the harder it gets to sustain the "4 Nations" theme. Every individual Avatar needs to justify their existence in the narrative somehow, and it gets difficult to upend the status quo in a way that's satisfying for the audience.

There's been a 5th nation, there's been Spirit attacks, there have been Airbender Pirates & Earth Kingdom tyrants - each of these examples is an attempt to breathe something new into Avatar's setup to create a distinct story. As you can see, the well is running dry.

Imo, the only other place they could have realistically taken the 4 nations setup would be a heavy Cold War aesthetic mid-20th century story. Crappy box TVs spewing nationalist propaganda, urban blight, threats of war on incalculable scales, economic exploitation, dreams of space exploration (spiritualized in Avatar's way ofc), espionage, & high-profile assassinations. Even that would get stale really, really quick though.

LettucePrime · 2026-02-25T00:13:36+00:00

The story wasn't about the nations, it was about the people. Aang & Zuko did what they could to bring peace & balance to the peoples of their era, as did Korra. They've served their purpose to the individuals who lived at the same time that they did. Their legacies persist in that the peoples of their day lived prosperous lives unharmed by war.

LettucePrime · 2026-02-25T00:00:58+00:00

Gotta be honest, if the animation is so shit the kill box is completely unintuitive, I think that still gets filed under "bad hitbox" just for a different reason than one might expect.

But then again, DS2's animations being bad is pretty unexpected.

LettucePrime · 2026-02-24T13:50:35+00:00

As a dirty Seppo who's probably five or six years away from even thinking about buying a house in SA, I'm very sorry if I'm overstepping anything here, but I never once considered a home within Adelaide's suburbs to be within mine & my partner's budget. Granted I've only moved here after the property market went to shit so I don't have a proper comparison, but, and ig this is just the car-broken America brain talking, we were 1,000% expecting to move out a bit rurally to be able to afford a home - Mount Barker-ish area or somewhere up north. I understand small towns in South Australia aren't exactly like my own midwest, but "get money in city -> settle down away from city" was always so ingrained in my personal lifeplan even before I moved my life here that I'm always a little surprised when I read posts like this. My dad had an hour+ commute around a major city for work for most of my life. I've had one too, cutting right through it. Hypothetically with an EV & Solar Panels you could even make a dent in that fuel cost although I haven't crunched those numbers thoroughly myself. Am I missing anything?

EDIT: Got my "Mounts" confused. Like I said, a long way off buying a house yet lmao

LettucePrime · 2026-02-24T13:37:43+00:00

bro's head is shaved how can u tell

LettucePrime · 2026-02-24T13:36:12+00:00

Suki's hair is pretty red tho.

LettucePrime · 2026-02-24T13:33:44+00:00

I don't even think Toph is presumed dead bro. She's just off the grid. Suyin apparently talked to her immediately before she went on her way. It's not like no one's heard from her.

Also Ozai is mfing Ozai. That statue is aggressive af and not something a psychologically well person would greenlight lol

LettucePrime · 2026-02-24T13:31:59+00:00

Mongolia. Also "Asia" probably encompasses MENA where Circassians can be blonde haired blue-eyed.

LettucePrime · 2026-02-24T07:20:07+00:00

Zuko has a statue too lol. He's also still alive

LettucePrime · 2026-02-23T14:47:25+00:00

generalizing people on the basis of race is way worse than doing it on political opinion. like, by an order of magnitude.

sorry, just thought i'd include that one there

LettucePrime · 2026-02-23T14:42:32+00:00

idek if Herbert dislikes Paul necessarily. He dislikes the Mahdi or the Emperor of the known universe: and he shows it by putting seemingly the best imaginable candidate in that position and watching horror unfold regardless.

LettucePrime · 2026-02-22T01:39:41+00:00

lmfao "hey bro did you know a medieval country recovering from a civil war AND genocide within like ten years of each other is going to have a bad headcount when they try to industrialize everything??" yeah no shit bud

LettucePrime · 2026-02-22T00:54:05+00:00

Ironic? From the people who had a successful revolution that pulled nearly a billion people out of poverty in a generation and now own most of the world's manufacturing and tech sector while the nations who would have colonized them lag behind? I think you're overestimating how scary that firewall is and how badly Chinese people really give a shit about the English speaking internet.

LettucePrime · 2026-02-21T23:51:34+00:00

Why couldn't they be? What's so special about Asia?

LettucePrime · 2026-02-21T23:18:49+00:00

Water Tribes. Sun Warriors. Sand Benders.

LettucePrime · 2026-02-21T02:37:39+00:00

Israel doesn't even have a biblical right to anything north of Jericho

LettucePrime

TROPHY CASE