And this is why we used to make cars out of STEEL instead of FIBERGLASS! Sure, fiberglass is a lot lighter in weight and hence a hell of a lot better for gas mileage. But you hit anything at more than 20 mph and the entire body explodes off the fucking thing, and now you’re spending more to repair the car than it’s worth because you need a entire front end, read end, or side panel. They can’t just take the damaged section off, beat it out with a hammer, sand it, and repaint it.
Everything is made with the idea of it being easier to replace than to maintain, aka planned obsolescence. Thanks, capitalism
You guys are obscenely, dangerously wrong.
It’s not planned obsolescence, it’s physics.
Modern cars crumple to absorb and distribute the forces of impact in an accident in an effort to protect the occupants. When cars didn’t have those crumple zones, the occupants, being the soft, squishy things they were, took those forces and were mangled or killed in horrible ways. Also, those older cars took hidden damage that often went unnoticed and made them very dangerous to drive.
I recently watched a TV show where a small sedan was run over by the trailer of an eighteen-wheeler. Run. Over. They had to unwrap the crumpled ball of a car from the undercarriage of that trailer. Guess what? The driver suffered only minor injuries because the car collapsed in exactly the way it was designed to so that she, in the very strong frame surrounding the passenger compartment, was protected.
And no, don’t thank capitalism for these modern cars. Thank Ralph Nader and countless other safety activists who worked tirelessly to make car manufacturers accountable for the safety of the people who drove their cars.
I introduced a friend to ATLA a few nights ago, and they had only
known two things about the entire show: the cabbage meme, and that Aang
apparently wants to ride every large and dangerous animal he can
possibly find. We got through the first five or so episodes, and my
friend noted that Aang is exactly what a 12-year-old would be like if
given godlike powers, and that this is literally just what he
could do with airbending. He can’t even wield any of the other elements,
and he’s one of the most powerful people on the planet, because he’s an
airbender.
And that got me thinking.
This snippet from Bitter Work is one of the few pieces of concrete information we get about the airbenders, at least in ATLA. Iroh is explaining to Zuko how all four of the elements connect to the world and to each other.
Fire is the element of power, of desire and will, of ambition and the ability to see it through. Power is crucial to the world; without it, there’s no drive, no momentum, no push. But fire can easily grow out of control and become dangerous; it can become unpredictable, unless it is nurtured and watched and structured.
Earth is the element of substance, persistence, and enduring. Earth is strong, consistent, and blunt. It can construct things with a sense of permanence; a house, a town, a walled city. But earth is also stubborn; it’s liable to get stuck, dig in, and stay put even when it’s best to move on.
Water is the element of change, of adaptation, of movement. Water is incredibly powerful both as a liquid and a solid; it will flow and redirect. But it also will change, even when you don’t want it to; ice will melt, liquid will evaporate. A life dedicated to change necessarily involves constant movement, never putting down roots, never letting yourself become too comfortable.
We see only a few flashbacks to Aang’s life in the temples, and we get a sense of who he was and what kind of upbringing he had.
This is a preteen with the power to fucking fly. He’s got no fear of falling, and a much reduced fear of death. There’s a reason why the sages avoid telling the new avatar their status until they turn sixteen; could you imagine a firebender, at twelve years old, learning that they were going to be the most powerful person in the whole world? Depending on that child, that could go so badly.
But the thing about Aang, and the thing about the Air Nomads, is that they were part of the world too. They contributed to the balance, and then they were all but wiped out by Sozin. What was lost, there? Was it freedom? Yes, but I think there’s something else too, and it’s just yet another piece of the utter brilliance of the worldbuilding of ATLA.
To recap: we have power to push us forward; we have stability to keep us strong; we have change to keep us moving.
And then we have this guy.
The air nomads brought fun to the world. They brought a very literal sense of lightheartedness.
Sozin saw this as a weakness. I think a lot of the world did, in ATLA. Why do the Air Nomads bother, right? They’re just up there in their temples, playing games, baking pies in order to throw them as a gag. As Iroh said above, they had pretty great senses of humour, and they didn’t take themselves too seriously.
But that’s a huge part of having a world of balance and peace.
It’s not just about power, or might, or the ability to adapt. You can have all of those, but you also need fun. You need the ability to be vulnerable, to have no ambitions beyond just having a good day. You need to be able to embrace silliness, to nurture play, to have that space where a very specific kind of emotional growth can occur. Fun makes a hard life a little easier. Fun makes your own mortality a little less frightening to grasp. Fun is the spaces in between, that can’t be measured by money or military might. Fun is what nurtures imagination, allows you to see a situation in a whole new light, to find new solutions to problems previously considered impossible.
Fun is what makes a stranger into a friend, rather than an enemy.
Pink took Pearl’s hands, crossed them one over the other, and said, “Let’s never speak of this again.” After this, Pearl was literally incapable of talking about what she did.
In The Answer, Rose took Garnet’s hands, crossed them one over the other, and told her, “No more questions.”
I just want to point out that in the podcast they discussed one of the rules in the show bible being that Garnet can’t ask questions. The writers are not allowed to write garnet asking a question ever. The explanation was that they do this in order to keep her sounding decisive, which makes sense in keeping with her future vision and confident attitude. I literally have not thought about this scene since the episode aired and now I’m screaming because listen
Is this a cute nod to their writing strategy? OR is their decision to make this characterization rule alluding to a much much darker thing that they haven’t been telling us?
What parts of Canada are Wade Wilson and Logan actually from tho? This is an important part of Thier relationship that’s really overlooked.
Like, Thier canadianess in general is overlooked, but if Logan is supposed to be from NWT or something and Wade is from, IDK, Vancouver, there needs to be an inter-canadian smackdown.
Responses from The Canadians so far:
Logan: Multiple canon sources and Actual Canadians agree he’s from somewhere in northern Alberta, (Fox Lake and Cold Lake have both been cited)
Wade: True to form, there are multiple conflicting canons about which part of Canada Deapool is from, but all the Canadians agree that in order to get Like That ™, Wade Wilson is 100% definitely for certain from Winnepeg.
1. I would like to apologise for the misspelling. I’ve got a reading disorder and didn’t realize my mistake until it was too late.
2. Everyone arguing about Regina is missing the point- that’s one of Deadpool’s many, many canons, all of which are valid but in our heart of hearts, he’s deffo from Winnipeg.
3. Who do I have to sacrifice a goat to to get art or a fic of Wade and Logan being Aggressively Canadian in front of LA Native Scott Lang, who has no idea what’s going on and has never actually seen snow IRL?
I’ve run into it tangentially at least a few times I think… Hmm. Interesting thought.
Yeah, as someone who was part of RV Classic? We had the whole “timeline doomed” thing because as far as we could tell at the time, that’s what was going on with all the Guardians dying! SBURB had tagged them all as “not necessary to player survival any more” and was quietly tidying things up, not caring about how the players would feel about that.
The fact that the trolls’ sprites all vanished/died just seemed to confirm this, at the time, and we didn’t really have anything to suggest that permanently removing non-player people who had entered the medium wasn’t part of how the game worked.
The idea that in a different universe, one where Bec Noir wasn’t in play, John would have had the option to try and bail Dadbert out of jail (and Momlonde might have been having tea with one of the Queens) is interesting, though – and the fact that Dad is initially captured and taken to Derse jail is suggestive of the fact that the normal procedures are to try and remove the Guardians from play in a less violent fashion, to force the players to act on their own without that support.
no. fuck this nihilism. “let the nazis win, we’re all gonna die in 20 years anyway.” NO. the reason the dems aren’t as progressive as you want them to be is because the overton window has shifted into full fascism. don’t you sit on your hands and say you’re not going to participate in society until superheroes descend and magically shift it back without you having to do anything about it.
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