This video is doing numbers on TikTok, but I wanted to share it here because I am so proud. The man being featured is my uncle Steve Smith.
Steve has been building drag racers & custom cars his entire life.
My grandma before passing away would tell the story of how when he was 10 or 11 years old - she came home to him taking apart the engine in her secondary vehicle (reserved for fancy outings).
She asked him why & he said he wanted to know how it worked outside of a schematic. & she told him that as long as he put it back together the way he found it, it was fine by her. & what's more - he put it back together from memory without even looking at a diagram!
If anything went wrong with the car, my grandma had him fix the car & it was that way until my grandma passed away. She never paid for a mechanic in her life again.
When Steve was a teenager he spent most of his time at the OKC Racetrack & raced with drag racers he built himself.
Also, as a teen he won the Bethany, OK wheelie championship by riding over a mile nonstop on his motorcycle on a single wheelie position.
All throughout my childhood he always had cars around in various stages of fixing up.
The city of Bethany refused to sell him the property next to his house to open his own auto garage. He had worked for Diffee Motors most of my life up until then. So he moved out in the country & opened his own garage.
Steve has been on several mainstream auto shows being featured for his custom work. He also built a custom car for one of the guys on Duck Dynasty. He was also offered a permanent role on an auto TV show, but he turned it down because it required moving out of state.
My uncle Steve is one of the sweetest, kindest & most generous people you will ever meet in your lifetime. He's as smart as a whip, has never met a stranger & gives the best hugs!
It just makes me so happy to see him getting the recognition he deserves.
The picture below is of him at a family function sitting next to his wife, Nancy.
I meant to hold off on posting this illustration of the results from a Particle Accelerator for a later time as I planned on refining and working more on this piece.
But since hearing of Peter Higg's passing, I've decided to post this early. Dedicated to my unending love and curiosity for Quantum Mechanics, and Peter Higgs himself who theorized the existence of the Higgs Field and Higgs Boson. Good night, sir.
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The Sad Bastard Cookbook: Food You Can Make So You Don't Die is a community-built, vegetarian/vegan guide to getting food in your facehole when you're suffering from depression. Or other mental illnesses or physical illnesses or *waves hand generally at the state of the world* anything else.
We've made it free on our website because life sucks enough without having to give Jeff Bezos money, but we also do have a paperback copy available for sale over there too, since we also need to eat.
i’ve always kind of assumed that lo and li are azulon’s younger twin sisters and that’s why they were foisted off on azula, because she’s also a younger sister to the crown prince. but the fact that we never actually see them firebend is strange, because it implies either that nonbenders are instructing one of the greatest firebenders in the world, or that they are firebenders who simply do not firebend. and i think that the latter is more interesting, because it reflects how their position as elderly women devalues any firepower they might provide to the empire, passive and subdued even as they train ozai’s favorite weapon.
they are the ones to most overtly illustrate azula’s precarious relationship to femininity, after all. for example, noting the position of her hair after she successfully lightningbends in “the avatar state,” or emphasizing azula’s beauty when they introduce her in “the awakening.” and it’s clear that azula doesn’t really like them, dismisses and avoids them whenever she gets the chance. she can’t even tell them apart. their very existence is almost a humiliation. a reminder to azula that this is who she is destined to become once she lives past her usefulness. not the imperious azulon, her namesake, raised above on a fiery dais, but his sisters, insignificant and functionally powerless.
so of course “almost isn’t good enough,” of course “one hair out of place” is a failure. the only way azula can prove her worth to the empire she has devoted her entire self to in a way that matters is, perhaps, by being perfect, by being better and stronger than the discarded women who came before her. but that, too, is a delusion, that any amount of excellence will reward her in a way that compensates for the erosion of her very humanity. and yet, it’s all she has to cling to. so she gives it her all to excel within a system that will never really care about her because she has deliberately been made incapable of imagining an alternative. of simply recognizing the system for the failure that it is, conceptualizing a world beyond the bars of her gilded cage, and leaving.
Billions of stars, how many unimaginable worlds ? How do they perceive time and space ? How do they define and express art ? What is love for them ? What drives their pursuit of knowledge and understanding ? What existential questions intrigue them ? I wonder, a lot.