i got so deeply enraptured with trying to figure out which restaurant jobs the dunmeshi cast would have that i forgot to check the speed on the industrial strength floor mixer i was using at MY kitchen job and sprayed mayo everywhere. anyways.
senshi would be the senior sous chef that everyone likes and respects way more than the actual chef. he does menu planning and uses cool local ingredients that put the restaurant on the food scene map. the boss you wish you had.
laios is a dishwasher but he REALLY REALLY wants to learn line so he spends a lot of time asking the cooks questions. comes in on his day off to watch senshi do menu planning. friends with all the waitresses even though they think he's kinda weird b/c he's too busy being a freak to back of house crew to bother them.
chilchuck is the prep lead. he's the best at precision so his consistency is through the roof and his knife work is perfect. the prep hall is his domain and he's got all these janky ways of making it accessible bc the kitchen wasn't built for halflings. champion of worker's rights and makes sure all the first aid stuff is properly organized.
marcille is the front of house manager who's been working there since she was a teenager. sometimes shitty customers will underestimate her and try to fuck with the waitstaff but she takes no nonsense whatsoever. new hires will think she's got beef with the cooks but their banter is just next level. bffs with senshi. (edit: she's in magic school but also has a fuckass minor in management so she's perpetually trying to bring in her course theories while everyone rolls their eyes and carries on).
falin i think works mostly with senshi to procure the uncommon ingredients he wants to use. she's also trained as a bartender so she'll step in occasionally but most of the time she's off talking to suppliers or tending the herb gardens out back.
the mad sorcerer is the head chef and he only works opening shift so no one ever sees him and cannot for the life of them tell what he contributes to the kitchen.
the restaurant is called the dungeon.
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"stop making [media] your whole personality"
ah... okay. yes. so.
first off:
there's this neurodivergent thing, where you use an interest as a filter for processing the world.
for some people that is called a "special interest," for others with different needs it is more of a "hyperfixation;" there are far more variations than i (or the field of psychology) know how to describe now. if you want to understand the difference there are people who can explain those variations better than me. but i can tell you what it feels like.
you discover something.
it doesn't matter what it is; you find something that speaks to you, something you can connect to, and it becomes a bubble of safe habitat from which you can rest from and explore and connect to all the other parts of this strange chaotic world.
a source of joy. a source of illumination.
it's like you're a person who has lived all their life in dark caves and you find something that glows.
these interests can be anything.
(literally anything; i personally derive meanings that you could never imagine from ✨ drainage ditches. ✨)
but very often, they are stories. tv shows, books, movies, comics, songs, podcasts, minecraft improv streams, cartoons, web serials, whatever
these things are:
tangible. you can hold them in your hands, replay them, turn on the subtitles, take screenshots, read the sheet music
and yet
real. they form a genuine connection from your (isolated, untranslatable) internal world to other (formerly unknowable) people and the rest of the universe
they create meaningfulness
and they exist because humans find these incredibly effective soul-deep ways of communicating to one another.
now, appreciating stories, that's not a neurodivergent thing. that's a human thing.
the point of relevance here is that experiencing an extreme love for stories is a neurodivergent thing.
it's a very common neurodivergent trait which often gets mocked, portrayed as childish, and used as a pretext for infantilization and bullying.
(and it is also a trait of young people in general, to take stories very seriously in a way that looks silly to adults, and that is something that many people (regardless of age) try to bully out of each other.
what good is that doing anyone?)
"stop making [x] your whole personality"
listen, you. get down off that goddamn embankment and climb down into this ditch with me. dip your toes in this oily water. watch the stars and city lights ripple into constellations you've never seen
now look me in the eye
you need to understand that no matter what lowbrow, cringey, problematic or otherwise not-to-your-tastes drivel you might be complaining about today,
you are talking about the phenomenon of creativity
you are talking about a transcendent catalyst of human emotion
and yes that includes the overmilked disney franchises, it includes the formulaic shippy fanfictions, it includes whatever brightly-colored cartoon this website is obsessed with this year (and will be having incredibly dramatic meltdowns over next year), it includes the cheesy action movies and the fanservicey anime and the badly-designed video games and the milquetoast tiktok "literature", it includes the indistinguishable scribbles of some random five-year-old and/or famous fine artist and/or precocious elephant
i get it. you care about real life and touching grass and shit. you have taste. just take the stilts off your horse for a second, okay?
i know you're probably sick of "let people like things" discourse
i would just like for you to stop for a second and take a deep breath, and let the stench of whatever is in this mud puddle wash over you (yeah i know, ew, but you'll be fine) and consider
what is so bad about having a cringey personality, anyway?
and maybe you will think better of making "stop making [some silly moment in the universe] your personality" into your personality and maybe you will come off as a little bit less of a snob/ableist/ass and maybe you will have a slightly better outlook on life among humans.
that's all. yeah you can get out of the gutter now. thank you for coming to my ted talk—
ooh wait, look, a bottle cap
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can you please tell us about dr professor sokka phd x 7
this ask inspired me to make a sokkademia tag. peruse at your leisure
sokka brings a certain philosophy professor energy to the physics department and a certain physics professor energy to the engineering department thats got all the students complaining to the dean bc he refuses to grade on a curve.
his standards are extremely high, but the worst part is he’s convinced his standards are like. the bare minimum and everyone’s just too STUPID to meet them.
he’s so divisive as a professor that students get in physical altercations upon debating his reputation. he has clear favorites and speaks to them specifically. the rest he dismisses as stupid and doesn't even bother trying to remember their names. but he respects the students who actually put in the work and they LOVE him and will go to bat for him like their life depended on it, even when faced with a (not uncommon) student who’s like “he told me to drop out,” they’re just like “and? sounds like you should’ve taken his advice.”
when katara learns how sokka treats his students she yells at him for hours. sokka’s just like “sorry but I can’t coddle and befriend my students like you do katara. we’re doing actual work instead of just playing with water” and she nearly kills him.
the university really wants sokka to give huge, accessible lectures that are open to anyone, since it’s great for business for obvious reasons. at first, sokka is just happy that he’s considered worthy of such a position, but he quickly realizes that he hates this setup. and since he basically has unlimited freedom since he’s in no danger of being fired, he’s instead allowed to construct very exclusive seminars in which he personally vets everyone who applies based on vibes.
after sokka starts playing favorites even more explicitly than he already had been, some students protest that sokka is “gatekeeping academia” and “being an intellectual elitist.” sokka’s just like “well that’s rich coming from people born in the upper ring of ba sing se. I invite students from all over the world to my seminars, including women btw.” that shuts them up real quick. (they also start admitting women.)
since sokka’s position as BSSU is basically kuei’s bribe to keep sokka as his advisor despite the fact that sokka cannot stand him, the university has no choice but to let him teach whatever he wants however he wants, since firing him would basically be treason against the earth king. sokka takes advantage of this privilege to the fullest. (and let’s be real. he’s earned it.)
he mainly teaches courses in the physics and engineering departments, but in his classes he discusses everything from art history to epic poetry to ontology. he barely even has a curriculum planned, he basically just talks about whatever he and his students feel like discussing. it’s nice to have a part of his life where he doesn’t need to adhere to a strict schedule. he knows it’s a privilege to not have a syllabus or a defined curriculum in academia, and he makes the most of it. his students know how lucky they are to work with him.
when he admits students into his class, he doesn’t actually care about prerequisites or what field they’re studying. in fact, despite officially teaching physics and engineering, he doesn’t like that most of them walk around with unearned superiority complexes, and is more likely to admit students who actually read and engage with art for pleasure. being "bad at math" is a way less egregious crime than not being curious and open-minded, in his opinion.
sokka doesn’t like giving tests, essays, or psets, since he thinks busywork is a waste of time, and he doesn’t wanna have to grade all that (for the first year, when he was giving lectures, it wasn’t an issue, since he had ta’s, but now that he exclusively does seminars, he has to grade everything himself, which is a fucking pain. he doesn’t have time for that!) so instead he just gives them one big research project with the open-ended prompt of “teach me something new.” nothing is off-limits. the weirder the better.
his students know that he is prone to go on tangents that can take up the entire class time, and it’s really easy to get him going. they’ll spend whole periods listening to him tell them about that time he got stuck in a hole while hunting and thought he was going to die, or debating the merits of airships vs sky bison as transportation.
ba sing se is a very insular city, and in it sokka has a reputation as an elitist, angry curmudgeon who keeps to himself aside from his inexplicable friendships with an elderly tea shop owner and that gloomy girl who sighs a lot. in the southern water tribe, on the other hand, sokka is seen as a goofy extrovert who knows everyone by name and is always looking to help out in any way he can (to the point where his compulsive need to help people is actually a little concerning). everywhere else, sokka’s reputation is generally somewhere in the middle, but these are the two poles. which means that whenever someone from his tribe meets one of his students, they experience this disconnect where they’re both just like “are you sure we both know sokka?? the sokka you’re describing is the same sokka as the one i know??? for real???”
sokka eventually gets sick of spending so much time in ba sing se. he suggests to katara that they should build a university in the south pole so that he can work there. katara’s like “guess what we actually do have a school in the south pole and i happen to teach there, only we don’t study book-learning for eggheads.” sokka reminds katara that the only academic universities in the water tribe are in the north (where they don’t admit women) and immediately katara decides to build a university in the south, and also it was her idea btw.
sokka does a lot of research in bending theory, and he occasionally uses katara’s students to help him with his experiments in hydrodynamics. katara doesn’t like that sokka thinks he can just steal her students like that, so she decides to turn the tables on him, see how he likes it. she finds his least boring looking student to ask out, and they get through a couple dates until katara finds his condescension too unbearable to continue. by the third time he’s told her that the only reason she doesn’t like math is because she doesn’t understand it, katara blurts out “my cat is sick i should go home and check on her bye” and leaves to punch the snow until she feels better. and they didn’t even hook up. what a waste.
toph, on the other hand, hooks up with many of sokka’s students. this is because toph likes women, which comprise a far less insufferable demographic.
no one in the gaang has read sokka’s books. zuko tried, he really did, but it gave him a really bad migraine. no one else even bothered the attempt. azula, mai, and ty lee on the other hand are all like, “you haven’t read it? sokka merely presents a theory of the particle composition of the spirit world via the notion of it as a fifth dimension interposed over space and time. it’s actually quite elementary stuff… that is, if you comprehend the foundations…”
wan shi tong has a few of sokka’s books in his library. the kitsune snuck them in there without his knowledge.
sokka coauthors a lot of his papers with yue, but since they’ve long since agreed that anyone but a select few being aware of their rendezvous in the spirit world is probably not a good idea, yue is happy with being anonymized. after all, the other spirits knowing that she divulged the secrets of their plane to such an insolent mortal would probably ruin her street cred.
sokka doesn’t really get along with the other professors. sure, they’re nice enough for the most part, and he admires their dedication to their fields, but the problem is that for all their knowledge in one extremely specific area of study, they have no actual practical knowledge or any understanding of the real world whatsoever. sometimes sokka will agree to go out with them for drinks, and even though they’re all older than him, he feels like he’s babysitting.
suki doesn’t spend much time in ba sing se, since they both agree that it’s preferable to hang out on kyoshi island or in the southern water tribe, or even the fire nation. but sometimes she’ll come if the earth king is throwing a party or if iroh has invited them for tea (at which point their reunion is extremely dramatic, as always, even if they saw each other just last week). one day the dean pulls sokka aside and is like “just because you’re a special case doesn’t mean you can date students” and sokka’s like “what??? why would i date a student???” and the dean says “well someone informed me that you were kissing a young woman on campus yesterday” and sokka’s like “suki??? you mean my girlfriend suki??? she doesn’t even live in ba sing se.” and the dean is like “nevertheless. you shouldn’t do that. i hear it’s making people jealous.”
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