The Analysis Blog

My current problem, the one i'm here to discuss, is this: people in comment sections saying "why is the government allowing this?"

the last time a us president had a problem with vietnam they carpet bombed the country and poisoned its people. agent orange had countless effects on generations of vietnamese people. buildings still carry scars from the bombs. ecosystems were damaged and destroyed. everyone drinks bottled water because there is no safe water and not everyone can afford the pricey purification machines.

regardless of the diplomacy and money aspect, which others have mentioned in those comment sections, vietnam still hasn't fully recovered from the effects of the french, chinese, and US wars fought on its soil. don't blame vietnam for trying to maintain peace with a president who has PROVEN he cares nothing for the lives of those in countries who have what he wants and the US soldiers who will die for it. blame the president of the US for leveraging his position for his own gain.

yes, the vietnamese government will carry blame for it. but the truth is, the Vietnamese people want to be left in peace and there is no way I can, in good conscience, blame them when we have watched tr*mp fund isr*el's genocide in palestine, start ANOTHER war in West Asia/North Africa, and send the national guard to attack the citizens on US soil. And that's not mentioning ICE.

Sources for the $1.5b golf course news:

RECENT:

The Financial Times: Vietnam moves its dead for Trump golf course

The Independent: Vietnam moves its dead to make way for Trump golf course

OLDER NEWS (9 months to a year old):

The Guardian: Farmers displaced by $1.5bn Trump golf course reportedly being offered rice and cash

If you're having trouble telling what the difference is between the two dinos, the joke is that there is virtually no difference, save for a feature we have no actual physical evidence for (unless there's been a big update I missed, we don't have any conclusive evidence of what large therapods were colored like).

This does not stop every paleoart subreddit or twitter/bsky artist following from being full of the most utterly miserable bickering pedants having wildly disproportionate reactions to minor and purely theoretical... I can't even call them arguments. Just different ideas.

Overall: The vibes are immaculate, but Probably Not

We have some fossil evidence to suggest juvenile Rexes were downy, but adults were almost certainly not

Especially not like this, because sparrows are floofy because they're little animals that live in temperate climates with cold winters, and T-Rex was a Very Large Animal living in tropical climates. It did not need the insulation.

That's a pose a T-rex could strike but not it's natural habit. The artist has also fudged the proportions a bit, in a very plausible way so always double-check your measurements and reference sources to make sure you're not making stuff up

T-rex would have had no need for flight feathers like depicted on the wings and tail, and it comes from earlier in the evolutionary tree than flighted dinosaurs so it wouldn't have them vestigially either

HOWEVER:

It's extremely valid and compelling to consider how feathering might have radically changed the silhouettes, especially in terms of camouflage and insulation for some of the smaller and midsize dinosaurs

Patterning and cryptic camouflage are also very valid interpretations, even on a giant non-aquatic predator, because a ton of animals are paler on the underside

The little bright cheek puffs are something that might have shown up as skin pigmentation, esp given that Rexes had extremely good vision and probably fairly sociable so communicative coloration would be a very valid and reasonable choice

So I noticed in A:TLA, and it’s carried over in LoK, that Airbenders always seem to have an advantage in a fight. And at first, it felt like plot armour, particularly in A:TLA.

But when Aang fought Bumi, he lost most of that advantage. And I realised that this wasn’t just plot armour. Someone had sat and worked it out: nobody has had to fight Airbenders for generations. 

None of the other nations have had to train to face them, or practised sparring with them, or anything. Apart from Bumi, no bender in the show has ever even met an airbender before Aang comes along. And in LoK, for the most part people still haven’t. We never see fights between those who have (for e.g. we never see Tenzin and Lin fight); when Korra and Tenzin use airbending, its a unique fighting style that people aren’t trained to manage.

It’s a really small detail, and it fundamentally works to give the heroes an advantage (and make up for Aang’s young age and lack of combat experience), but I love how it’s an advantage in combat for completely logical reasons.

aang straight up says to the fire nation guards on zuko’s ship “you’ve probably never fought an airbender before”, because he in-universe figures out that, if what everyone around him is saying is true, and airbenders have been extinct for a century (or at least have gone to ground enough to make people think that) then he is a totally unknown figure in anyone’s calculations

this has been brought up before but it’s also one of the reasons why hama is so thrown in her fight with katara - waterbending is about energy exchange, keeping things flowing, throwing your opponent’s power back at them and we see katara and hama do this in their fight. however, when katara is faced with a powerful blast from hama, she stands her ground and blows it apart:

[image ID: a gif of katara in the puppetmaster. she is a teenage girl with dark skin and hair and blue eyes, wearing a red outfit. she turns and throws her hand out, stopping a blast of water and turning it into a huge shield. the background is a dark forest. end image ID]

why do i bring this up?

It’s completely different than anything we’ve seen from other metal benders, who bend metal with sharp movements like the derivative of earth bending that it is

But her college had fencing equipment but no team, so she started coaching them. But she fenced lefthanded. She ended up with a team of fencers who almost ALL learned to fence lefthanded.

A small % of fencers are lefthanded, so even very good fencers are often NOT USED TO fencing lefties.

So her dinky little team of mostly newbies came in and fucked severely with teams of much more experienced fencers who couldn’t cope with fencing leftie after leftie. Her one protégé who was also very tall just laid waste to nationally rated fencers.

Whereas I, a very shitty fencer, can hold my own against my wife no problem, because I’ve fenced her from the start.