I like to imagine that in any atla modern au, aang still, for some reason, finds a reason to beat ozai’s ass
Aang: *explaining to someone that he is a pacifist*
Sokka in the background: yeah except for that time in high school when you kicked the shit out of Zuko’s dad
Aang: THOSE WERE EXTENUATING CIRCUMSTANCES PLEASE —
sokka: did it feel good
aang: violence is unproductive, and the antithesis of —
sokka, talking over him: because watching Zuko’s dad get his shit rocked by teen Caillou definitely made ME feel good. and if you do something that makes people happy, doesn’t that mean it’s a good thing?
aang: … that’s not how it works but thank you.
Aang: I think problems can and should be solved without violence!
Ozai: *does something characteristically shitty within Aang’s field of vision*
Aang:
the rest of the gaang watching Aang judo flip Ozai over a table:
Gyatso that night at dinner: I received an interesting call today.
Aang, sweating: oh wow crazy how that happens isn’t it? Technology is amazing
Gyatso: It was from your school. They were calling to tell me that you’ve been assigned after school detention for the next month because you beat up a grown man on campus today. Would you like to tell me your side of the story?
Aang: it was Zuko’s dad and he deserved it
Gyatso, who had a speech about the perils of succumbing to violence prepared but who also knows all about what a dirtbag Ozai is bc of his weekly brunches w Iroh:
it’s also honestly my experience that the people most dedicated to pacifism are the people who most want to solve problems by punching someone, and who are Really Good at punching someone, but by having that skillset quickly realize its incapable of solving most problems.
There is ONE problem you can definitely solve through violence, and it’s when you meet a person who thinks that what they’re doing - while wrong and even evil - is societally without consequences. I mean, what’s going to happen? You gonna punch him in the face? you’re not gonna punch him in the face. no one is. he’s invincible.
Aang, meeting Ozai, realizes that this is a man who has never feared being punched in the face for his actions. Aang solves this problem.
Tldr: It’s some colonizer shit. Hawaiians are being denied access to clean water, housing, a living wage, etc due to resorts/vacationers getting priority.
I said it in the notes on the last post but I’m gonna say it again.
I’m married to someone with severe memory problems. Automation of household appliances & systems helps him a lot and helps me a lot because it reduces the number of things I have to keep in my brain at all times. I love doors that lock themselves, being able to schedule dog food being delivered, a thermostat I can manipulate from wherever. Beyond my little bubble it should be noted that voice controlled appliances can be really good for people with mobility concerns. Appliances that can measure and talk and remember little tasks can be such a blessing for people.
I will never forgive Amazon and Google for taking technologies that could be really helpful and weaponizing them, and fuck everybody who acts like its some kind of conspiracy theory that those devices are spying on you. You absolutely should be distrustful of those devices but just make sure you’re getting angry at the right people.
Making accessibility devices evil is just like so Disney villain
My mom is blind and without her Alexa literally could not cook, go shopping, or do a million other things. Because Alexa is voice-activated, she doesn’t have to fumble with knobs or write a list she can’t read.
I will never forgive Amazon for how much I hate a tool that allows my mother to live her life.
Open source and secure alternatives for some of these:
- Voice activated smart speaker: Mycroft (can be purchased as a complete unit, or DIYed with a Raspberry Pi and microphone+speaker array) https://mycroft.ai/
- Smart Home automation: home-assistant (cannot be purchased, originally developed by MIT) https://www.home-assistant.io/
- Zigbee (the wireless protocol for smart lights and other smart devices) bridge: Conbee II (this takes the place of a Phillips Bridge, for instance. And is in many cases better because it works with all brands of smart light that use Zigbee–which is almost all of them, including the cheap IKEA ones–and also works for devices that aren’t lights. Cannot really be DIYed because Zigbee needs special hardware, not just software) https://phoscon.de/en/conbee2
I don’t know any alternatives for locks, vacuums, thermometers, or anything else sadly. None of these are that difficult to set up with just a little bit of tech know-how, and extensive guides already exist for almost all problems you could run into because the open-source community is almost psychotically dedicated to its projects, unlike Amazon, Google, and Apple where it’s practically impossible to get help with any problem that’s even slightly unusual.
Oh thank you!! These area really neat
Oh thank you so much! My grandmother has an alexa and it’s really improved her enjoyment of life, but I hate even talking around it. It’s linked to my amazon and I’ve gotten suggestions based on things it’s heard. That wigs me out so much.
Can confirm, Home Assistant is amazing; I transitioned everything I could for it to control and right now that’s literally everything. It can also be integrated with other voice-activated smart speakers than Alexa as well as Alexa. It also comes WITH an Add-on called Ada for voice. So far, there is very goddamn little on the market that isn’t either officially supported or community supported and stuff is being added at the rate of literally weekly. If you do scripting and have a taste for diy, you can be Dr. Doom and your home is your supervillain lair.
Because of the market, most smart appliances and devices are Alexa enabled, but unless they’re made by Amazon, that doesn’t mean they’re Alexa exclusive and even then, someone is hacking their way into the API and pulling the endpoints. Right now, the only thing I can’t work in here (yet) is my Nest Thermostat and HA is working on adding that back in right now.
Home Assistant is fully compatible with the zwave and zigbee standards as well as wifi and bluetooth; you can directly control zwave and zigbee items or link up your existing hubs for it to control like SmartThings.
It can be run in several ways; I’ve done it on a Pi 4 both 4G and 8G and a VM on my Ubuntu server and while the Pi is recommended–I recommend it too for convenience–it’s one of several possibilites. Currently I’m using a Raspberry Pi 4b 8G with a solid state hard drive instead of SD card. You can purchase z-wave and zigbee modules to add to it for direct control of z-wave and zigbee devices or use your existing hubs (or both). Beneath the HA umbrella is also links to the blueprints of building your own zigbee and zwave devices with Arduino just to start that HA can also control. I’m not saying you’re going to be building your own smart thermostat on the weekend, but apparently, some people are doing just that.
This does not require a high tech start value; most integrations are automatic, you just say yes and login and let it happen, it even creates your Dr. Doom dashboard with TABS.
Again, you DO NOT NEED TO KNOW ANYTHING BUT COMPUTERS EXIST AND HOW TO CLICK YES AND NO TO USE THIS. For me, it was actually easier than a lot of setups with shit I had to pay money for that said they were easy. This is open source, but that is not synonymous with user unfriendly; a lot of work was done to make this accessible to the casual automation user. The UI is card based; when you first start, HA does it all for you and creates discrete cards that control different things on your dashboard; no effort on your part, you can turn on and off any light in here or turn them red while someone is in the bathroom because that’s fucking funny. But as you get more comfortable, you can start to create your own configurtions, take direct control of the UI, and mix it up; it’s up to you.
But.
If you are a DIYer or just want to be or never knew you wanted to be but feel the vibes and need a place to start, this is the perfect sandbox for learning and escalating. There are a metric ton of tutorials, community add-ins, and message boards to consult. If you can imagine it, it can be done and its likely someone is working on version eight right now. The primary languages are python and javascript with yaml for configuration files for DIY. You can create your own layouts, your own sensors, and your own cards if you don’t like what they have. If you’re like me, you may also go in to community addins and add new stuff to their code so it runs like you want it to; it’s all up to you.
I am not a dev pro, I’m a QC analyst with a scripting hobby; I do this quite literally for fun on weekends or when I’m bored or anxious and need to soothe myself with coding.
Here is the home page of my MULTI-TAB dashboard. Yes, that is a floorplan of my apartment and those glowy orange and dark grey bits are things that I can turn on and off from the comfort of my bed. It’s fun.
I seriously would kill to get more people into this and have someone to play with and enjoy the feeling of controlling all within my (apartment) kingdom with but a single command. Dear God tell me if you’re into it; we’ll be best friends and hopefully you’ll be okay with that.
Here’s an intro to Home Assistant I wrote back in September in DW when I first started, with screenshots. You’ll also be able to see my Dash when I first started compared to the dash above. Feel free to ask me anything from the perspective of someone not a dev professional, an engineer, or even has a degree in anything, much less anything like this, and yet is a QC lead who codes their own testing tools and for whom this is just something cool and fun.
tumblr please give me an improbable & outrageous history fact
The death of Franz Ferdinand was an absolute shit show.
There were 7 assassins hired to kill Franz, all were amateurs and 2 had Tuberculosis. All were armed with a gun, a hand held explosive, and a cyanide pill in case they got caught.
The first 2 assassins, the psudo leader of the assassins and a child, were first to have a shot at Franz. Neither took the shot for some reason.
The third assassin, who had TB, was on a bridge a bit ahead of the first 2, he through the explosive, which bounced off the roof of Franz’s car and blew up car behind them because the assassin forgot to account for the fuse length. He then ate this cyanide pill and jumped in the river.
The cyanide pill was out of date and the river was shallow. He flopped in the water like a disappointing fish and violently vomited everywhere.
The fourth assassin, also with TB, was stationed in a sandwich shop in the center of town. He decided to just sit around and see if Franz would come back.(foreshadowing)
Franz, instead of leaving the area where someone tried to assassinate him, stuck around and went to town hall to give his speech. The note cards for said speech were in the blown up car. So he had someone go back and retrieve these bloody note cards from the burning car so Franz could give this speech.
Then, again, instead if leaving the town where someone tried to blow him up, Franz decided to visit those injured in the explosion at the hospital. The chief of security and the mayor made a route that went through a bunch of back roads to avoid going through the center of town, where the car was blown up.
No one told the drivers.
So the Franz and company shipped out, with all but Franz’s car taking the back roads. The chief of security, who was in Franz’s car, stopped the driver in the center of town, right next to the sandwich shop, so they could push the car back and take the back roads because this all happened before reverse was a standard function in cars.
Sandwich shop assassin was still there, and chose violence. He went out, shot Franz, and took a shot at the chief of security, but missed and killed Franz’s wife. He then turned himself in, feeling guilty for killing an innocent woman.
Sandwich assassin turned in all of the other assassins and all were charged.
Psudo leader got the death sentence
The TB bunch both got 20 years, even though they are the only 2 that hurt anyone and sandwich guy actually killed Franz.
The others got 8 years, 6 years, and 2 got 4 years in accordance with their ages as they were under 18.
It would almost be really funny if it didn’t kick off WW1.
Holy shit I looked it up and did the math; all but one two of the seven would-be assassins were under the age of 20.
Why wasn’t I told that WWI was triggered by a group of teenagers???
THIS CHANGED MY PERSPECTIVE ON SO MANY YA FANTASY NOVELS
i think the recent discussion on how queerbating is not the same as queer subtext is interesting, but I have to say that even if a show has queer subtext instead of queerbating, it’s still not text, and therefore claiming it as representation on the same level as explicitly queer text is disingenuous. My opinion is that if your average person can walk away from the show not seeing it as a queer romance because the romance is all subtext, it might still be good and valid as queer subtext but it isn’t representation. representation refers to textual depictions, not subtext. And no, the creator word of God does not count.
i can’t vibe with anyone who thinks icarus was an ignorant idiot for flying too close to the sun. “oh i’d never do that i would have remembered my father’s warning and been fine”. do you seriously think that after years of imprisonment, feeling the sun on your face and the open air beneath your wings, you would be able to focus on anything but the joy of being alive and free? do you actually think that if you were given the opportunity to go where nobody has never been before, you wouldn’t want to push it to the limit? to dare to be the first to try what no one else has ever even thought possible? do you honestly think you’re too good for your own human nature? look me in the eyes and tell me if i strapped a pair of wings to your back that could take you wherever you wanted to go whenever you pleased that you’d be careful and sensible about it. you are not better than icarus just because you have the benefit of his example.
