I really love how the improvement of technology has somehow correlated with governments all around the world actively deciding to make the postal system worse.
this post was made with Europe in mind (from the bottom of my heart: fuck the new EU import rules jesus fucking christ) but actually Americans should be livid as fuck about the changes USPS made to under-1lb packages to rural zip codes.
One of the important parts of USPS has always been that they treat all locations in the US the same way. There is famously a post office in the Grand Canyon that uses donkeys to transport mail. Even UPS and FedEx often use them for the tail end of their deliveries because of this.
But USPS just announced that in "rural" zip codes (I have not been able to figure out which zip codes these are), all packages are priced as though they're at least a pound, even if they're nowhere near that. So a 2oz package is now priced the same as a 15oz package. This comes just a few weeks after they announced the same changes for all of Alaska and Hawaii.
The post office is not a business, it is a fucking public utility. And Congress should fucking act like it.
Just saying, countries that refuse to subsidise or otherwise help rural residents are actively driving people out of farming and are therefore going to become more dependent on imported food. Like many choices to stop helping people, it’s not just cruel it’s stupid
I really love how the improvement of technology has somehow correlated with governments all around the world actively deciding to make the postal system worse.
this post was made with Europe in mind (from the bottom of my heart: fuck the new EU import rules jesus fucking christ) but actually Americans should be livid as fuck about the changes USPS made to under-1lb packages to rural zip codes.
One of the important parts of USPS has always been that they treat all locations in the US the same way. There is famously a post office in the Grand Canyon that uses donkeys to transport mail. Even UPS and FedEx often use them for the tail end of their deliveries because of this.
But USPS just announced that in "rural" zip codes (I have not been able to figure out which zip codes these are), all packages are priced as though they're at least a pound, even if they're nowhere near that. So a 2oz package is now priced the same as a 15oz package. This comes just a few weeks after they announced the same changes for all of Alaska and Hawaii.
The post office is not a business, it is a fucking public utility. And Congress should fucking act like it.
The degree to which modern fans deliberately project their personal psychological issues onto fictional characters is alarming.
You are expected to "relate" to some characters and stories. Yes. That is not the same thing I keep witnessing, where people will decide a given character is literally everything they are the very instant they have anything in common, or an antagonist is exactly like a real person who hurt them, and emotionally invest SO much into this that they can feel actually betrayed when the events deviate from exactly the catharsis they hoped for.
This seems so normalized by some people, I suspect they assume by default that this is basically what fiction is "for" and it never even crossed their minds that you're supposed to enjoy most stories as an outside observer rather than as some sort of guided roleplay session.
This is why creators get harassed and abused more than ever by entitled fandoms.
No, it's not normal, you are not supposed to think of it that way, fictional characters are separate beings from you.
Something a lot of people forget about Holmes is that, because ACD was Like That, his 'relatable audience insert' Watson is actually a lot weirder than Holmes is
That is something that is so fun about reading the books, Watson being the narrator adds so much because you slowly realize how bizarre his perspective is and how strangely grounded a lot of Holmes’s ‘strange’ behavior is. There was something so fascinatingly wrong with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and he passed it on to his self insert.
I’ve said it before but most of what is ‘wrong’ with Holmes is largely understandable and a lot of what is wrong with Watson can be explained by him being a British man from the 19th century but there are just some things about Watson that make you go ‘Dude, what the fuck?’
ATLA, the show, Korra included, had consultants for a variety of aspects of the writing and production process.
They had historical consultants for the show's technology and real-world allusions, such as figuring out how the Fire Nation's trebuchets would work.
A cultural consultant who was an actual professor in the field.
A blind consultant to advise on how Toph would behave or move.
Consultants for martial arts, including martial artists, stunt coordinators, etc.
It's unspeakable how insulting in comparison that "According to CHATGPT" part of the panel is.
Just the sheer fact that they chose to write that instead of, IDK, citing the sources the LLM inventedlisted? That they felt comfortable writing that?
That's even ignoring them yapping about how they are shying away from real-world allusions and creating their own language and removing all those real-world references that grounded the setting.
Or using freaking Eren Yeager as an example/inspiration.
This is a problem I have had with the direction they've been trying to pull the series in in recent years. From prior statements, I get the feeling that Bryke really took the criticism of being a couple of white boys appropriating Asian cultures to heart and have been actively working to be Not That ever since. And that's great in some respects! The team has worked extra hard to try to make up for certain short comings, like casting their VA with a lot more diversity than the original majority white cast.
However, they're also taking an approach with the newer material that I feel is almost as damaging: they're slowly trying to erase the original non-white influences out of their setting by stripping the culture away one change at a time.
Here's the thing. Avatar the Last Airbender, the original series, was a first of it's kind for many American kids, explicitly portraying a world without a single white protagonist. It's been praised by it's non-white audience for years as being one of the first- if not only- times they saw themselves being represented not just as the good guy, but the main character in a Western production (previous positive Asian rep was often relegated to the role of quirky sidekick or mentor to the white lead protagonist). The thoughtfulness with which so many details had been included, subtly, without comment, as to normalize those aspects of life and culture from not just Japan and China (the dominant and most familiar representation of Asian cultures to non-Asian audiences at the time) but smaller, less globally known countries (S. Korea, Tibet, Thailand, the Philippines, and Vietnam among others) is still unique in the US media landscape some twenty odd years later.
I'm just a nobody and my opinion is just that, but it's my belief that stripping this away from the world of Avatar out of embarrassed white guilt is a mistake. If anything, they should be leaning further in specifically by hiring MORE cultural consultants. ESPECIALLY from indigenous circumpolar nations! Constantly failing to empower native voices has been a major complaint of mine and others for years. The Watertribes should be given the same amount of respect and attention to detail that the other nations have gotten, and they have never been given that chance. The team could also bring on more consultation from South Asian countries, diversifying the world and having more guidance on avoiding potential ignorance pitfalls.
We really don't need another generic fantasy-scifi setting that vaguely hints at orientalism for the same amount of flavor as a can of Lacriox. The world of Avatar is something special that stands out over other animation, and television in general, both at the time it first aired and now. Bryke need to ease up the strangle hold of creative control and see what can happen when they stop trying to make something that's theirs and start trying to make something that's good.
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