Case Study: Rana Plaza Collapse
In April 2013, in Bangladesh, the commercial building known as the Rana Plaza collapsed due to structural failure. The confirmed death toll was over a thousand people, with thousands more injured; it is considered to be one of the deadliest accidental structural failures in recent history. Multiple reasons were given for the cause of the collapse, including:
The foundation; the building was constructed on an in-filled pond
Illegal construction; the top floors of the building were added after the fact, exceeding the weight limit of the already existing lower floors
And the use of substandard construction material
Even worse was the fact that cracks had been discovered in the building the day before the collapse but workers in the building were ordered to return the next day regardless.
Sources/Further Reading: (Image source - Wikipedia) (Rethinking the future) (Independent) (International Labour Organization)
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do you have any particular thoughts regarding marcille being a half-elf? its interesting to me considering the fact that she seems self-conscious about being a half-elf, but denies it when its brought up
i remember marcille looking visibly uncomfortable over laios simply asking her how old she is, which i think the only reason she might feel nervous about this is because it might reveal her as a half-elf to him.
she's never corrected anybody whose called her an elf either.
never mind the circumstances of the reveal, in which thistle goes on about how half-elves are inferior and accusing her of wanting to become full blooded elf, she seemed particularly upset like he struck a nerve-
i wish the half-elf thing was built upon more. also, underrated marcille line:
okay so i revisited this sequence just to make sure I could back myself up and it's just... man. there's a lot going on.
the first reaction we get from Marcille is this huge panel that takes up half of the page
she is viscerally affected. flushing to the tips of her ears with the intensity of it. and we see it again, a few pages later
so it might seem like she's embarrassed about it and lying to herself, but... I really think it's just that Thistle is accidentally hitting sore spots. If you really look at what he says to get these reactions
"you'll live out your entire life [...] and die that way too"
"a hundred years from now, nobody will be there"
Hear me out. I think, if he stuck to harping on about her inferiority without bringing up how terrifyingly long-lived she is, she wouldn't have been as bothered. But right now, Thistle is accidentally hitting all the marks on Marcille's deepest fears-- and this is after the Winged Lion promised her that her dreams could come true in an extremely vulnerable moment, so it also hits her slightly guilty conscience as well.
I do truly believe that Marcille isn't bothered about being a half-elf the way that people assume she'd be bothered by it. To her, the biggest problem with being a half-elf is that it's isolating.
On one hand, it's not hard to imagine why she'd distance herself from elves in the west. A lot of them can clock her as a half-elf on sight, unlike other races, and therefore she's always branded with this weird stigma of being Othered -- I would even say that she considers herself lucky for being born outside of elven culture instead of having to grow up in it. I mean, just... look at the way elves talk about her.
Skipping past the uncomfortable implication of what 'not tolerating the existence' of half-elves would actually entail, this is incredibly fucking annoying. You can see why she wouldn't want to be around elves much. You see a lot of Marcille reacting badly here, but honestly, almost all of it can be attributed to her freaking out that her bluff completely failed. She's honestly more paying attention to Izutsumi's footsteps and trying to coordinate an opportunity to escape.
And in the end, you see her built-up frustration at being asked if she wants to be a full-blooded elf like 2-3 times in a row.
Yeah, yeah, "the lady doth protest too much," and all. But we know Marcille. We know that she's a lot more embarrassed and horrendously unconvincing when she's being prodded about something she's actually self-conscious about.
Moving onto the flipside of things, it might seem weird that she "pretends" to be a full elf around other races, but it's not really that strange if you think about it. Again, people are weird about her being infertile or whatever, and a lots of them don't even know much about what sets half-elves apart from everyone else. I mean, look at how uncomfortable Laios is just asking her about it
and look at how exasperated and resigned she looks
And like... she's right. Where would that come up in normal conversation? Why would she go out of her way to tell them? She's functionally a normal elf to other races anyway -- got the ears, the abnormally long "childhood", and the huge mana capacity. Unless it's directly relevant or important for people to know, I don't think it's all that strange or indicative of insecurity that she prefers not to bother with it.
(This combined with her sense of being an "outsider" to elf culture also explains why she thinks elf superiority is embarrassing. She sees the way elves treat short-lived races from the "outsider" perspective nonetheless, and thinks it's obnoxious; especially more so because she usually has to play the elf around short-lived races and deal with the reputation of arrogance that elves have built up.)
The sad thing is, this all means that... she doesn't actually fit in anywhere. She doesn't like going out West much because of how elves treat her. But she's also an outsider in the continents she was born in, treated like this exotic long-lived alien choosing to live among short-lived races for some reason. She is always an outsider, the Other, no matter where she goes. Add in the fact that she'll live longer than literally anyone she knows, and it's honestly kind of heartbreaking.
And I think that's the crux of it. Marcille really doesn't act like she's at all self-conscious about being a half-elf because of any feelings of inferiority or being half-made or whatever. She considers herself a perfectly legitimate being and might even, in some ways, consider herself superior to normal elves because she's not blind with elf supremacy or whatever. (And whatever "elven biases" she displays, all of them are born more out of the fact that she's kind of bad at conceptualizing how other races age and mature compared to herself, not that she actually considers herself better or more mature simply for being an elf.)
I think that whatever self-consciousness Marcille has about being a half-elf is, instead, related to terror and loneliness. The reminder that it ensures she'll never truly belong anywhere for the rest of her very long life. The reminder that, in truth, even she's not actually sure how old she is by other races' standards (hence the discomfort when asked how old she is). She doesn't want to not be a half elf, or be a full elf or full tall-man-- in her ideal world, she's still a half-elf. She just gets to live out her life at the same pace with the people she loves and doesn't have to say goodbye again and again and again until she dies.
and one last very important panel, right after Mithrun tells her that all her desires would be devoured
In her ideal world, she's still a half-elf and reality magically starts marching at her pace. But failing that, the second best thing is that she's still a half-elf-- but one who is able to accept reality and let go of her fear.
(But the rest of the story pans out the way it does because, to Marcille, taking reality apart and reshaping it was less scary than simply and fully reconciling with it.)
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How does piepoe make it's friends? Do they Frankenstein them? Make them out of pizza dough?
I'd definitely say it's a big mix of Frankenstein,(in which Piepoe took a lot of the original concepts and parts of certain creatures within the tower and squished them all together to try and create something) and using a bit of his own body/materials, and definitely some amounts of pizza dough that it could find.
(it's really shown with the anchovy artwork on how Piepoe tried to create these fellas. This one)
She'd grab a bunch of already defeated ones, take them into its little hidden room, and try to craft something from them. I think he also used a good amount of his own body to try and give them "life" in a sense. Which just ended up with big clumps of squishy material with very mixed colors, that breathed and twitched every once in a while.
But eventually, they got really good at crafting shapes, and mimicked the original concepts of the few enemies she chose and managed to craft little living and breathing friends who follow anything that seems friendly around. :3
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Creep
Also known sometimes as cold flow, creep is the slow plastic, or permanent, deformation of solid materials that occurs over time when said materials are subjected to constant stress. Creep is most significant in solid materials that are operated at high temperatures, such as jet engine turbines, as the rate to failure is typically faster the higher the temperature. Several internal mechanisms contribute to creep, dependent on materials' microstructures, properties, composition, etc., including dislocation movement, grain boundary sliding, and diffusion. Creep is not just limited to polycrystalline metallic solids; plastic, wood, concrete, and glass materials, among others, also experience creep.
Sources/Further Reading: (Image source - Material properties) (matmake) (Wikipedia) (Thermal Processing) (Yena Engineering)
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i will always advocate for skipping classes btw. to all the high schoolers following me: don't sweat having a perfect attendance record it quite literally does not matter. if anyone tells you good attendance is important for being considered for scholarships they're lying to you. my attendance was fucking abysmal and i was offered several full-ride scholarships because my grades were still solid and that's all 90% of colleges care about.
and besides. taking care of yourself - whether you need a mental health break or you're tired or you just frankly don't want to go to that fucking class - should always take priority! now don't take a page from my book and skip a month and a half's worth of pe classes because you ditched One Time because the coach said he was going to make everyone run a mile that day and then he kept trying to get you to "make up" the mile that you missed so you kinda just stopped showing up until he gave up on you forever like please know that you should go to class regularly BUT.
i think taking time off and leaving early and such needs to be normalized. for school and work. i don't think it's fair to punish people for needing breaks. the human brain is literally not made to sit in the same stifling environments for 8 hours almost every day and just focus on "working" or "studying" and "learning." it's very cruel to deprive young, still developing minds especially of proper breaks and time to Play (not that it's not cruel to do the same to adults)
if the system won't give them to you freely though... well. break the rules a little. you know your limits better than anyone. don't try to work to an impossible standard. rest when you need to!! it's very, very easy to burn yourself out, but it's very, very, very, very difficult to recover from it
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also sorry to double post but i'm going to be thinking about this rewatch for a while now lmao
i know there are a lot of resources that talk about the differences between the sub and dub but i'm kind of losing my mind at how much better the build up felt for apocalymon in the sub?
like specifically that's the thing that's been sticking with me among all the other little differences here and there
i don't remember anything in the dub about distortions being a rampant issue, for instance, but they're mentioned frequently around the etemon arc (and actually i have to wonder if the dark network core was intended to be an extension of apocalymon past the wall of fire)
it's explicitly told in the sub that the dark masters even used the distortions to rise to power in the way they did, reformatting the world in the process
and like i know the ruins on file island (which prophesize apocalymon's return) are commented on during that first arc, but also, that's in both sub and dub. the whole distortion thread doesn't make it into the dub at all from my recollection
and then at the end explaining that the fairy time shit (1 mn IRL = 1 day in the digital world) as consequential of apocalymon!!!
i remember when i first watched 02 i was so confused as to how that fairy time 1 mn / 1 day thing was just gone!! that's part of what always bothered me when watching 02, because it felt like such a blatant ignoring of pre-established canon and the explanation in-dub never felt right (idr if they even explained it)
ourgh anyways
sub apocalymon may not be making jokes about their existential crisis of an existence but i still wanna give the damn mon(s?) a pizza
poor thing deserves it
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