toonscallop

It recently watched a single episode of one piece in German and they call luffy “ruffy” for no good reason. That isn’t even a German name. They also replaced ussop with “lisop”. The others all stayed the same.

Why?

In early localization of One Piece, Ruffy/Luffy and Zoro/Zolo were common mix-ups before the official English spellings became standard because the Japanese could be read either way. If the dub started with "Ruffy" they might elect to just continue with that for the sake of consistency, even though authorial intent is that it is supposed to be Luffy.

Also, characters names have meaning in the original Japanese. The "uso" in Usopp's name is literally the Japanese word for "lie". So "Lie-sopp" or "Lüge-sopp" would be a complete literal translation of his name that preserves what Japanese-speaking audiences hear.

When i started as a dishwasher, i was trained by an old career dish pit man named Claudio. He'd spent his whole life washing dishes. It allowed him to move to just about any city in the world that he wanted to and get a job without having to deal with complex hiring processes or strict resumé requirements. Which was the main thing he wanted out of a career. I still think about him.

He'd seen a lot of people come through that station who either didn't consider it a real job or thought it was beneath them, on their way to "better" or "more important" things. And, in retrospect, those first two days he was sort of doing the minimum with me that he could do and still respect himself when he told the manager he'd trained me.

But, maybe it was because i was really interested in learning all the positions there were in a restaurant because i knew they were ALL important, or because i was a hard worker, or maybe it was because i tried to have real conversations with him in my broken spanish and did my best to not make him speak any english unless he wanted to, but after a couple days there was a big shift in the way he and i worked together, and he started to really teach me.

That place ran the dish pit with one dishwasher, so when he was done training me I was going to be doing the job on my own.

The thing that stuck with me the most, for the rest of my restaurant career, was this... and it wasn't just the actual things he was saying, but a completely new way of looking at what i was doing within the context of how the restaurant ran. I came in for my 3rd day and he said

"When you work alone, you want to go home by midnight?"

we clocked on at 3:30 and took a half hour lunch break and usually skipped our tens, so, yeah i absolutely did want to get off work by midnight

Then, even tho i already knew where most of everything was by that time, he took me around and showed me all the dishes, cups, pots and pans, spatulas, silverware, had me look at all of it. Then he told me to remember that almost every one of the dishes I was looking at would be used more than once by the end of our shift- we were clocking on to wash the entire building full of dishes multiple times.

Then he led me back over to the industrial dishwasher most restaurants have, which looks like this:

and then this 60 year old career dishwasher from Mexico City said the thing that changed how I looked at restaurant jobs forever

"This machine takes two full minutes to run a cycle. We are on the clock for 8 hours. That means we have a maximum of 240 times we can run this machine. If you want to wash all those dishes, clean your station, mop, and clock off by midnight? This machine has to be on and running every second of the shift.

If you don't have a full load of dishes collected, scraped, rinsed, stacked, and ready to go into the dishwasher the second it's done every single time? You can't do it. If, over the course of 8 hours, you let this machine lay idle for just one minute in between finishing each load and being turned on again? Instead of 240 loads, you'll do 160 loads.

[like, literally, he had done this math, he had these exact figures]

160 loads instead of 240 loads means you are doing 20 loads in an hour instead of 30 loads. That means the dishes are going to pile up. The cooks will run out of pots and pans and will have to stop and wait for you, the servers will run out of plates and cups and have to stop and wait for you, and your night is going to SUCK. Every part of how this restaurant works can grind to a halt because of that idle minute between dish loads, and if it does you'll have an entire building of people in a hurry and all waiting on you.

And it means you're going to be here until 2 am doing the 200+ loads of dishes this restaurant goes through every night.

For this to work, you MUST have this dishwasher on and running every minute of the shift. As soon as you turn it on you have two minutes to have the next load ready. See these large items i put to the side down here? One or two of them takes up all the space in the machine. I keep them here so that if the machine finishes and shuts off before i'm ready for it i can stick one of these in there and turn it on again immediately. You have to think like that to do this job without stress."

The way he was looking at how the whole restaurant ran, the way he was looking at how he'd spend each minute of the entire shift, the way he broke down what the physical limits were and how to max them out so he could do his job and go home on time without stressing out... The way this 60 year old guy, who had never had professional ambitions beyond being a dishwasher, was still such a competent and brilliant expert in his field.

It was all such an important lesson, and one that stayed with me through every position i went on to work in restaurants, dish pit, busser, server, cook, all the way up through manager before I finally got out of my restaurant career

Claudio never wanted to be anything but a dishwasher who didn't stay any later than he had to.

But he knew how that restaurant ran better than most of the other people in it. I never had a chance to truly thank him for the specific lesson he taught me, because while it had an immediate impact, I didn't really understand how valuable a lesson it was until much later.

In my younger years I worked at a medical office that managed both mental health and addiction recovery. The company had purchased an empty lot down the road from the building we rented to build a better facility with larger capacity. The CEO worked for months with the architect, and just as they were finalizing everything they happened to let me - who was the receptionist at that time - take a gander at the blueprints. It took all of three seconds for two major issues to jump out at me.

“The receptionist can’t see the waiting room from her desk with this layout.” I said. “It’s around the corner and blocked by a wall.”

“Is that important?” They asked.

“Do you want me to be able to keep track of the patients who are waiting?” I asked.

“Isn’t that what the sign-in sheet is for?” They asked me.

“Not everyone who comes here is signing in for an appointment, some are coming to check in, some people are here for the group therapy and need to be directed to the other side of the building, some people are painfully shy and if I don’t appear warm and inviting they won’t approach.” I explain.

“How often does that even happen?” They asked.

“Every day.” I explain.

“Bullshit.” They said.

“I’m not joking at all. Also, where is the chart room?” I asked.

“Oh, over here.” They said, pointing to a tiny closet on the far side of the building from the receptionist and check out desks. It was tucked neatly beside the CEO’s office. To get there the secretaries would have to go through two sets of security doors and it would be a five minute walk each way.

“Why isn’t it next to the front office, since that’s where the people who use it are?” I asked.

“We had concerns about people just going into the chart room to goof off and not do their work. It takes them away from their desks too much. You should only go in the chart room twice a day - once in the morning to pull the charts for the day, and once in the evening to put way the charts. It would remain locked and the CEO would have the key and let you in to supervise.” They said.

“We pull charts the day before so everything is ready to go and we can alert staff if a patient with additional needs is coming in. We have to go in the chart room every time a patient calls in that’s having a problem with their meds or is in crisis or otherwise has a question for the nurse. We have to go in there every time someone cancels and we are able to fit a waitlisted patient in. We go in there 20 - 30 times a day for legitimate reasons. The only reason any of us has ever gone in there to take a minute was when we got news that a patient had died and we were crying. And even then, we filed charts as we sobbed because no one in this office has free time.”

They stared at me.

“Sit with me for an hour and see what happens up here.” I said.

They took the blueprints away from me before I could keep looking at them, but they took me up on sitting with me. They didn’t last an hour. They changed the blueprints to fix both things I’d pointed out.

Unfortunately, they didn’t let me keep looking at it and they never asked the janitor what he thought, so no one caught the final fatal flaw in the design.

There were no closets in the entire building. Nowhere to put our supplies. And I’m not talking just a place for stationary and pens. I mean no janitorial closet. Nowhere to put paper towels and toilet paper or cleaning products. Nowhere to put holiday decorations or anything at all. They completely forgot about storage of any kind and immediately started eyeballing my hard-won chart room for it.

The reblog chain is one of the things that makes Tumblr unlike anywhere else. All the notes on reblogs are attributed to the original post, no matter which branch people actually liked or reblogged. We want to keep encouraging conversations, and give contributors the recognition they deserve. 

Soon, you'll be able to like, reblog, or reply to any part of a reblog chain, and that note will go to that reblog's author. Each reblog will have its own counts, instead of one aggregated number from every version of the post. And yes, you’ll be able to like multiple posts in one chain.

If a reblog doesn't add anything, the love flows up to the last person in the chain who did. Your post doesn't lose notes just because people spread it quietly.

Past notes will stay on the original post — we're only changing what happens from here on out. Retroactively re-attributing all of them would be... a lot.

Remove ability to communicate

???????

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The first movie has Tony Stark icing, like, 30 dudes, with methods as varied as "Hitting him so hard his spine snaps" to "just blowing him the fuck up with a tiny missile."

I grew up with the cartoons of X-Men, Superman, Batman, and Spider-Man, all of which made "no killing people" a central part of their identity. It was more than just appeasing censors. It was the deep, profound belief that there were ways to solve seemingly any problem without bloodshed.

I think an important part of this discussion that hasn't been discussed extensively is that Iron Man (2008) released at the end of George W. Bush's presidency, partway through the War on Terror, well into the Iraq War, before Osama bin Laden was found and killed, and into the most aggressively pro-torture, pro-military, anti-Muslim eras of USA media. Much of American media at the time for almost a decade was hyper-violent, and/or highly nationalistic, and/or revenge fantasies against Muslims/unspecified Terrorists. The "Middle East is evil" was not just racist screed, but government policy.

By the time Iron Man (2008) had come out the USA had been so inundated from imagery of terrorism imagery and USA military imagery which centers the conflict in the Middle East from both fiction and real life news media that that the general response to this image was recognition, not shock.

This is all to say that the thesis of Iron Man (2008); that conflict in the Middle East is perpetuated by USA war profiteering and that the heads of technology should take responsibility for the harm their technology causes, in context, could be considered counterculture. Other then-progressive gems include Tony Stark refusing to sell weapons and pivoting his company into solving the energy crisis, and Ho Yinsen, his benevolent mentor-doctor, being re-adapted from Asian to Afghan, sub-textually suggesting that Afghan people are actually human beings (wow!) capable of benevolence and maybe deserving of protection from violence (through violence!).

It should be noted that the scene where Tony Stark massacres militants in Afghanistan in context is Tony Stark getting revenge on his and Yinsen's kidnappers and freeing Yinsen's home village in Afghanistan from terrorist occupation. Cut for the movie trailers, it just looks like Iron Man killing members of Al-Qaeda

So, bizarrely, I posit that Iron Man (2008) is actually a deescalation of violence for the time it was made in. This is despite the fact that it doesn't question American military exceptionalism, does not question the then-popular narrative of Afghanistan insurgents as the enemies of America, and does not have a less-than-typical amount of actual violent content for a 2008 action film.

There is no such thing as timeless media, and the reason for violence in media is often violence in real life. I think, to understand a film, it is important to understand the culture that a film was made for. Understanding the popular politics at the time a MCU movie came out is far more important to understanding the film than watching every movie and TV show set in its cinematic universe. You can't really understand Iron Man (2008) without the context of the War on Terror, any more than you can understand the original Iron Man (and its egregious Orientalism) without the context of the Vietnam War.

So, Iron Man (2008) is the way that it is because it was made for the USA of 2008; a public discontent from 5 years of a seemingly pointless war overseas in Iraq and having yet to gain any closure from the attacks on 9/11 attributed to Afghanistan insurgents.

Similarly, the reason why Superman (2025) is so tonally and philosophically different from Iron Man (2008), or even Man of Steel (2013), is because it was made for an American public experiencing what I would call "cruelty fatigue" as decades of cynicism in media and real life is finally taking its toll.

Speaking of DC, what were they up to in 2008?

The year 2008 was also the release year of the widely-beloved Dark Knight, a movie that could be argued is darker in tone than Iron Man (2008), despite the fact that its hero is against (directly) killing any of his enemies (Let's not talk about Ra's Al Ghul in Batman Begins (2005) for now). The movie re-imagines the Joker as a bomb-planting criminal super-terrorist who claims that his main goal is to spread chaos.

In order to take down criminals, Batman crosses multiple lines including but not limited to:

Extra-judicially extraditing a foreign criminal hiding across international borders. Batman tracks down a businessman from Hong Kong and brings him back to Gotham to be prosecuted. USA intervention across borders is common enough in American media throughout the century that this is not emblematic of the era's politics by itself, but...

Placing Gotham under a mass surveillance network made out of collecting cell phone data in order to track down the Joker. This is literally a provision of the Patriot Act. It should be noted that the film admits that Batman's actions are unethical, but does not have a firm conclusion on whether it was wrong to do so in response to the Joker.

Uses interrogative torture as a tool for counter-terrorism. The most meme'd scene from the movie ("WHERE ARE THEY?!") is Batman being allowed by the GCPD to brutalize the Joker (currently in police custody) to get the location of his kidnapped victims. Batman is successful in getting the location because Batman rushing to rescue the hostages is part of the Joker's ultimate plan, but that doesn't change the fact that Batman frequently uses interrogative torture and it appears to have a 100% information-get success rate for him. The rate of success by itself is a political statement on the efficacy of interrogative torture. Interrogative torture was a popular topic of discussion in the years proceeding 2008 for reasons. There was also a general shift in the 2000s of heroic characters relying on interrogative torture that didn't exist in the same way in the decades prior, and actually ended up influencing government policy regarding torture. An honorable mention goes out to the crunchy-snap of Sal Maroni's legs.

Intentionally or not, this film is also a laundry list of mirrored political talking points from the War on Terror. I don't think the choices in these films are all intentional political statements on then-current politics by the filmmakers, but I think the discussions in politics of the time was so ubiquitous that it was impossible to avoid the shift it made in popular media.

REAL PEOPLE DO NOT WORK LIKE THIS.

Republican policies and misogynistic rhetoric are killing the white birth rate.

White conservative single men are broken.

White conservative single women can't find a decent partner.