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The European Union already forced Apple to abandon its proprietary charging port and adopt USB-C across its entire iPhone lineup. It just did something bigger. A new EU mandate requires every smartphone sold in Europe including Apple devices to feature a battery that can be replaced by the user without specialist tools, without voiding a warranty, and without sending the device to a manufacturer approved service center. Batteries must maintain a minimum capacity threshold after a set number of charge cycles and replacement parts must remain available for up to ten years after a model goes on sale.

The consumer electronics industry built its current business model around batteries that degrade, cannot be replaced at home, and create a natural upgrade cycle every two to three years. The EU just legislated that model out of existence in the world's largest regulatory market.

Apple, Samsung, and every other manufacturer now faces a choice between redesigning their devices for the European market or accepting that their current hardware architecture is no longer legally sellable there.

aang having to let go of katara isn’t — in fact, logically cannot be — about having to let go of love, because there is no mention of having to do the same for sokka, toph, appa or momo. and even if we make the caveat that pathik was referring only to romantic love, it still can’t be true because we know that previous avatars have loved and been loved romantically without issue. roku, kyoshi and kuruk all had romantic partners, so there is no reason aang cannot. then it follows that aang needing to let go of katara specifically can only be because what he feels for her is not love — true, pure, selfless love — but attachment. aang’s choice isn’t actually for katara at all; it’s a choice for himself, because he doesn’t want to let go of her.

there’s a reason that aang’s grief over the air nomads gets brought up in this same episode, because it is inextricably intertwined with both his feelings for katara and his role as the avatar. after all, it was his being the avatar that led to the fire nation’s attack; it was his abandonment of that role out of fear that caused him to survive instead of being slaughtered with the rest of his people. the weight of his responsibility, and his failure to meet it, is the weight of his grief, and he cannot accept the former without coming to terms with the latter. this is a large part of why aang has latched onto katara, as a crutch to avoid having to face not only the reality of his loss, but the reality of who he is, and why he has to let her go in order to master the avatar state, the embodiment of what he once ran from.

the narrative framing of the guru episode makes it clear that the audience is meant to view aang’s choice as the wrong one. there’s pathik’s ominous warning — aang intentionally concealing the truth about not having mastered the avatar state from toph and sokka — and even iroh’s advice about choosing love over power (which gets thrown around a lot to defend the narrative dropping this plotline later on) is notably given without iroh being aware of the actual nuance of aang’s situation. with knowledge of the full context, it’s highly likely that iroh (a proponent of meeting your destiny on your own terms) would have said something entirely different.

it’s also narratively inaccurate to attribute the choice of the avatar state to being the choice of power, just as it is to attribute the choice of katara to that of love. within aang’s arc and the set up of his character, the avatar state does not represent power but actualization: the manifestation of who he truly is, and must become. it’s the equivalent of aragorn taking up the crown of gondor, simba returning to pride rock — a staple of the classic hero’s journey, where the protagonist fulfills his goal by facing what he does not want to face and accepting who the story needs him to be. if we apply the Want vs Need paradigm here, then katara is the Want while the avatar state is the Need.

the same arc is mirrored with zuko in the book 2 finale, drawing upon the two characters’ relationships as narrative foils. both zuko and aang choose wrong — choose the Want — and pay the price. then comes sozin’s comet and the agni kai, and the conflict of love vs power returns again with katara as its lynchpin — but this time, when zuko leaps in front of azula’s lightning, we know it’s the right choice because the story has established the choice of katara as the Need, as the completion of zuko’s actualization as a character. in aang’s arc, the choice of katara represents divergence, leading him further away from his destiny; in zuko’s arc, it’s a convergence, the re-alignment of who he was with who he’s destined to be.

When ranchers in Utah's Rich County found eighteen sheep killed in March 2022, they assumed coyotes. USDA Wildlife Services flew a plane over the kill site and found something feeding on the carcasses that had only been confirmed in the state eight times in forty years. It was a wolverine. Utah sits at the extreme southern margin of the wolverine's North American range. The animal is built for the deep snow and high alpine of Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming, country above ten thousand feet where the winters last eight months and the terrain rejects everything that is not specifically engineered to survive it. A wolverine showing up in Utah's ranch country was not a routine predator complaint. It was a biological event. State wildlife managers had no protocol for it because they had never needed one. Biologists set specialized barrel traps near the sheep carcasses. Catching a wolverine in a live trap is considered one of the most difficult captures in North American wildlife management. The animal is trap-smart, solitary, covers enormous distances daily, and operates almost exclusively in terrain that humans struggle to access on foot. The odds of a wolverine walking into a barrel trap were close to zero. The next morning, a sheepherder found one of the trap doors dropped. Inside was a healthy, twenty-eight-pound male, estimated at three to four years old. It was the first wolverine ever live-captured by biologists in Utah's history. The team sedated him, packed his body in ice to keep his core temperature stable during the examination, fitted him with a GPS tracking collar, and released him into the deep snow of the Uinta Mountains. For researchers who had spent careers studying an animal they almost never got to see, that collar was the first real-time data source on wolverine movement the state had ever produced. The data that came back over the next twenty-five days confirmed what wolverine biologists in other states had documented but Utah had never been able to verify on its own ground. The animal logged over 195 miles of travel in less than a month. He did not drift south toward lower elevations or leave the state. He locked into the high peaks of the Uintas above ten thousand feet and ran massive looping circuits through avalanche chutes, rocky ridgelines, and snowfields deep enough to bury a man standing upright. The daily distances he covered would qualify as an endurance event for a human athlete on flat ground. He was doing it through the most physically punishing terrain in the state, in winter, alone, at elevation, without stopping. The eighteen dead sheep that started the whole sequence were never repeated. The wolverine moved into the high country and stayed there, operating in a landscape so remote and so hostile that the only evidence of his existence was the GPS signal pinging coordinates from ridgelines that no person had visited in months. The collar proved what the forty years of scattered sightings could only suggest. The wolverine was not passing through Utah. It was living there, quietly covering nearly two hundred miles of frozen alpine rock in less than a month, completely invisible to every human being in the state.

Did he have his name written down on something?

Or is that what the people who dug him up thousands of years later decided to name him?

And how TF does he even have a fanbase?

Ötzi is a 5300-ish year old mummy, found in the Ötztal Alps in Italy (hence his name). While the earliest form of writing was emerging from Sumer at the time, Ötzi likely came from a civilisation with no writing system.

Ötzi has a fanbase because frankly he's absolutely fascinating. For a long time he was the oldest tattooed person ever discovered (in 2018 older Egyptian mummies were discovered), with 61 tattoos, a series of lines and crosses, primarily on his joints. These tattoos were likely an early form of acupuncture since he had worn joints that likely caused him pain.

The amount we've been able to study and understand about Ötzi is incredible, and he has offered us an incredible view of the European Copper Age. He was 45. He was 5"3. He was around 50kgs. We know what his final meal was, how he dressed, where he came from and how he travelled to the Ötztal region (through pollen in his lungs). We know he was involved in copper smelting (high levels of copper and arsenic in his hair). He could still have 19 descendants alive today. We know he was sick three times in the last six months before he died. We know he had whipworms. We know he was lactose intolerant.

We know he was murdered. Not killed by a stranger, or robbed. He was murdered by someone, and it was probably personal, and he did not know it was coming. He bled out, from an arrow to the back, and nobody helped him.

His last meal was elaborate. He was not on the run, or in a hurry to get away. He was not chased up those mountains. Where was he going? Why was he being followed? His body was not looted. He was a wealthy man, for his time. He had good quality clothes, shoes that people have reconstructed and hiked up the mountain in (and found surprisingly comfortable, apparently).

Weapons, too. He was found with a copper axe, a knife, arrows and an unfinished bow, baskets and medicines. These were all valuable possessions. People were not so rich back then that they could easily discard items like this- so why were they left to rot on the mountain with him? Was the fact they'd been touched by Ötzi really so repugnant to whoever was on that mountain?

There are at least 4 other people's blood on his gear. On the knife. On the arrows. The arrow that they shot him with was left in his back but the shaft was removed.

We know so much about Ötzi. We know everything about his finals hours- except for everything about Ötzi. We do not know who he was, we do not know his name, and we do not know why he was killed. His murderers stand in the shadows and will never come out into the light.