But Getting Better

max blunder: eats mashed potatoes by the handful

At the start of my employment, my boss showed me videos of people stealing, and we both had a chuckle about it. How silly they were! There was a camera overhead, and it’s not to watch the shoppers. See, we can’t actually stop shoplifters. They get away with it maybe nine out of ten times. But we, who are watched and tallied and witnessed? We are always caught.

At first it was hard to hold one hundred dollars bills. An amount I had never seen before. An amount that didn’t exist in my household. It’s normal now. Here is something that is not for me.

“What the hell, I’ll take another,” says the man, pondering our 200 dollar watches. What the hell. Total comes to 580 and not even a flinch in his face. I have been working for 11 hours today and made only 110 dollars. It will go to my rent. Today I work for free, it feels. When I get my check, I will have 35 dollars left for food and saving.

The six hundreds he hands me go into the cash register. For a moment, I imagine having money. Then I put it away, counting out his change.

I know for a fact we sell our products for double what they are worth. That I could be making commission. That they could hand me those 580 dollars and change my life and not even mark the difference in their checkbooks. He’s not the only sale they make today, but I am the reason they made it. He’s not the only one spending 600 dollars, but if I hadn’t spent two hours with him telling me about his life, he wouldn’t have spent any. I go home. I don’t own a watch.

I have watched and rewatched a video on how to make salmon four ways. My shopping list is always the same. Pasta. Rice. Tuna. If I can afford butter it was a good week. I dream of the world I will never walk in, where I can throw the best fish fillet in the cart with a shrug. I hold hundreds in my hand and look up at the camera. I put them under the cash drawer.

I go to work. I scrap together my savings. I eat my bowl of rice slowly. My manager takes a paid week off from work just for his birthday. He owns a yacht. 

i was part of their college program. i moved to the state for it. they legally owned the building i was living in and still charged me rent. i ostensibly was being charged to work for them. it was a 2 bedroom apartment and they placed 6 adult women in it in forced triples.

as many as one in ten disney employees have experienced homelessness while working for the company. despite huge efforts to unionize, strike, or otherwise demand fair treatment; disney has refused to increase employee quality of life.

disney admits publicly that a good portion of their success is because the employees (“cast members”) are dedicated, passionate, and selfless. this is never reflected in pay. even “face” characters (ie those that are princesses etc) make barely above a minimum wage.

at the time that i worked there, i made $8.50 an hour. at one point i was asked to create a human shield around a bag because a bomb dog had alerted to it. for eight fucking dollars an hour.

i now work a very cushy office job. i have bought the salmon and cooked it all four ways.

i go to the store. i am nice to the person behind the counter. she looks up at the camera while she counts out my change. there is nothing fundamentally different about her and i.

This took far longer than it should have but to be fair I don't do animation a whole lot (or at all, really)

...

... Still better fireworks then what Trump had going.

Anti-Jinko discourse is rare, but neutral or negative-leaning criticisms do pop up from time to time. One of the more common of these is the idea that Jin is "not a character." Some re-phrasings may go along the lines of:

Zuko is too important/developed/dynamic a main character to have a love interest who is not.

Jin/jinko has less than 5 minutes of screentime.

Jin is just a one-off filler character with no real personality.

Jin is, in fact, a character. More specifically, she is a flat character (in terms of the series proper - I'm not including the novel in this analysis). The "round vs. flat" dichotomy is often conflated with "well-written vs. poorly-written," where flatness equals a lack of character. While flat characters can be the result of creative fumbles, dismissing all of them as bad, cliched, or boring misunderstands their purpose.

Flat characters contrast the round (or dynamic) characters with their simplicity and stability. They don't undergo great change and are usually built around a defining trait, archetype, and/or role. They can help establish tone and themes with their predictable natures, which may also kickstart events, raise the stakes, and/or become complicating factors. Flat characters, when well-constructed, can be as memorable and beloved as their rounder counterparts.

The best example of a flat character in A:tLA is, arguably, Suki. Suki's personal developments are uncomplicated and happen mostly off-screen. She is a valuable ally to the Gaang, a love interest for Sokka, holds a position that assists with worldbuilding, and her appearances revolve around these roles. Members of the creative team have noted that Suki was not originally intended to appear after The Warriors of Kiyoshi. She was a one-off character with a specific narrative function, who was so well-liked she was brought back.

I can imagine a few knee-jerk reactions: "Suki is different! They actually brought her back and developed her relationship with Sokka! She's got useful traits and skills!" My intention in comparing Suki and Jin is not to say that their status in canon is the same. Rather, because they were both one-off, flat characters at their creation, they carried similar potential. This potential is what shippers and Jin fans are responding to. Jin was not taken down the fan-favorite, supporting character route like Suki, but fans do remember her. She is remembered because she does have personality, because that is her purpose as a flat character.

You know who else is green?

JIN

local school teacher gets main protagonist-ed against his consent, more at 12.

You guys asked and I delivered more of the Star-Spider Grace AU. And guess what? ISSUE#2 is already available on my Ko-Fi!

OpenAI scraped the entire web. All of which had been a labor of love from humans. Wikipedia is the backbone of a lot of LLMs, and that was volunteer human labor. They stole it and now they're selling it back to us.