Female, cis, bi, 33, Zlut she/her The Count of Freezyberg is my best friend.
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General fuckery, bi pride, you know... the usual.
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Theyâre also shooting for 100% renewable plastic sources by 2030! All of the soft plant/leaf elements in sets right now and going forward are made out of bioplastic made from sugarcane, and theyâre working on getting the regular hard plastic bricks out of that, too.
Theyâve done it, actually! The full bricks are in the prototype stage now, and are expected to be 100% biodegradable without the need for a commercial compost facility. Itâs very cool. Right now theyâre testing the durability and playability of the bricks and seeing what needs to be revised/reworked on their final model.
So its that easy huh
Of course it is
Actually, this isnât âeasyâ and is huge news. You see, Lego is absolutely meticulous about their quality control. Their standards for manufacturing are stupidly high, as are their safety requirements. You know that distinctive âclickâ when you pop two Lego bricks apart? They engineered that. That sound is so distinctive that it can be used to tell genuine Lego bricks from counterfeits and itâs a sound that would be based on shape and material.
Furthermore, one of the hard requirements for a Lego brick is that it must be compatible with any other Lego brick. If I buy a set today and pull a set from the 1980s? Those bricks would fit together perfectly. This requires a huge amount of precision engineering and controls on manufacturing quality. (I canât remember the source, but Iâve at least heard that once the brick molds wear to a certain point, theyâre pulled from the line and either melted down or turned into construction material for Lego HQ. Point being, no one is getting their hands on a worn Lego mold)
Recycled and non-petroleum plastics are different from other plastic. The chemistry is different. The timing and process to use them is different. This has been a reason why more companies havenât moved to them, because thereâs a drop in quality for material (so they claim).
What Lego just did is completely obliterate that argument. The corporation with some of the strictest quality control requirements for plastic just kicked the basic foundation of the âbad qualityâ argument out from under it, because if they feel confident enough to guarantee the same experience as using a brick from over 40 years ago, if they are confident enough that they can meet their own metrics at a huge industrial scaleâŚ.
It is still sooooooo fucking funny that tumblr, the âfuck that old manâ website, the villain apologist website, AND the paranormal boyfriend website read Dracula and went âCount Dracula sucks, we hate this dude.â Planetary alignment levels of unlikely.
Iâve got a tiny black hole in a jar. Cute and incomprehensible isnât it? Donât open the lid. The last guy who did that got turbo radiation poisoning.
No itâs not a pet but it does eat light. Which is pretty easy to acquire all things considered. Just shine a lamp on it.
Again, do not open the jar.
What does it weigh? Only about ten pounds. Itâs like carrying around a cat. In fact, a cat may have turned inside out on itself to make it. Or maybe it was a small dog or a raccoon, Iâm not sure.
In any case, seriously, do not open the jar.
*opens the jar*
*you immediately fall over due to going through all stages of every type of cancer in 2 seconds*
*closes the jar*
They never listen.
Wait, how come you donât have cancer?
I donât open the jar.
To those of you saying that the black hole would blow up in less than a nanosecond, clearly not. Because itâs still in the jar.
It would not blow up because the event horizon of a black hole that weighs as much as a cat would be miniscule. No idea how you suspended it in the jar though.
I didnât say it was suspended in the jar. It still has mass. Itâs on the bottom of the jar.
I think the Hunger Games series sits in a similar literary position to The Lord of the Rings, as a piece of literature (by a Catholic author) that sparked a whole new subgenre and then gets blamed for flaws that exist in the copycat books and aren’t actually part of the original.
Like, despite what parodies might say, Katniss is nowhere near the stereotypical “unqualified teenager chosen to lead a rebellion for no good reason”. The entire point is that she’s not leading the rebellion. She’s a traumatized teenager who has emotional reactions to the horrors in her society, and is constantly being reined in by more experienced adults who have to tell her, “No, this is not how you fight the government, you are going to get people killed.” She’s not the upstart teenager showing the brainless adults what to do–she’s a teenager being manipulated by smarter and more experienced adults.
She has no power in the rebellion except as a useful piece of propaganda, and the entire trilogy is her straining against that role.
It’s much more realistic and far more nuanced than anyone who dismisses it as “stereotypical YA dystopian” gives it credit for.
And the misconceptions don’t end there. The Hunger Games has no “stereotypical YA love triangle”–yes, there are two potential love interests, but the romance is so not the point. There’s a war going on! Katniss has more important things to worry about than boys! The romance was never about her choosing between two hot boys–it’s about choosing between two diametrically opposed worldviews. Will she choose anger and war, or compassion and peace? Of course a trilogy filled with the horrors of war ends with her marriage to the peace-loving Peeta. Unlike some of the YA dystopian copycats, the romance here is part of the message, not just something to pacify readers who expect “hot love triangles” in their YA.
The worldbuilding in the Hunger Games trilogy is simplistic and not realistic, but unlike some of her imitators, Collins does this because she has something to say, not because she’s cobbling together a grim and gritty dystopia that’s “similar to the Hunger Games”.
The worldbuilding has an allegorical function, kept simple so we
can see beyond it to what Collins is really saying–and it’s nothing so
comforting as “we need to fight the evil people who are ruining
society”.
The Capitol’s not just the powerful, greedy bad guys–the Capitol is us, First World America, living in luxury while we ignore the problems of the rest of the world, and thinking of other nations largely in terms of what resources we can get from them. This simplistic world is a sparsely set stage that lets us explore the larger themes about exploitation and war and the horrors people will commit for the sake of their bread and circuses, meant to make us think deeper about what separates a hero from a villain.
There’s a reason these books became a literary phenomenon. There’s a reason that dozens upon dozens of authors attempted to imitate them. But these imitators can’t capture that same genius, largely because they’re trying to imitate the trappings of another book, and failing to capture the larger and more meaningful message underneath. Make a copy of a copy of a copy, and you’ll wind up with something far removed from the original masterpiece. But we shouldn’t make the mistake of blaming those flaws on the original work.
Other examples of “blamed for things their copycats did” include Watchmen (blamed for the gritty antihero comics of the 90s) and Madoka Magica (blamed for excessively edgy and grimdark magical girl shows).
Four years on, and I think you might be the first person to add this type of comment to this post. After receiving so many comments that are like “THG is nowhere near on the level of LotR” or “THG didn’t invent YA dystopia”, it’s so refreshing to see someone understand exactly what I meant by framing THG as “a work blamed for its copycats”, and expand on it with examples that I didn’t know about.
It’s so rare to get an original comment on this post. Thank you so much.
the postal service names their shit exactly like how a 16 y.o. names angsty fanfic
Explain.
try and tell me literally any one of these would not fit above a short story about two wholly random men from the MCU fingering each other, or possibly 12 chapters of one or more characters from a CW show being in high school while having a photogenic but terminal kind of cancer. try.
ok so i want to say in hindsight i think i could probably have been clearer
