Copycats might also be an issue. I remember that when Douglas Wreden published his book, he had to deal with numerous AI-generated copycats popping up one after the other, using his name and face, trying to trick people into buying their book, because his had become popular.

Microsoft seems intent on pushing people to alternatives. Not only did they quietly remove the higher RAM recommendation, but now the OS is more expensive.

So what people are likely to get an underpowered computer that costs more if they have to buy a new laptop. On the tail of Apple recently releasing a relatively nice and cheap laptop to much fanfare, no less.

It sounds like we’re about to see a repeat of the Windows Vista days. Where people hate Windows because it’s slow and horrible, and it is slow and horrible because it’s running on an underspecced machine barely meant to run the previous version of windows.

Like do I want to read the Lord of the Rings as imperialist propaganda against orcs and Southrons and wildlings, who actually have valid political objections to the axis of Human-Elf-Dwarf hegemony? Hell yeah I do because I’m a leftist freak, but I recognize that I am fundamentally misreading the moral context the story is presented in–it’s about archetypes, about human values, about that nature of evil, not as an independent entity in itself, but how it can manifests in each one of us.

Funnily enough, I think Tolkein might have also enjoyed that. He was long-conflicted about the nature of orcs, being that his religious beliefs maintained that evil could not create from nothing, but only twist, and even then, it could not corrupt someone past possibility of redemption.

So orcs were stuck between being elves corrupted past redemption, or something sauron created.

Probably the WORST thing a story can do is mix and match “people are only evil because of we misunderstand them” and "people are purely evil.¨ I don´t see it often, but I think How to Train Your Dragon does it.

Or change it on the fly for the same character.

Cruella de Ville going from someone so single-mindedly obsessed with the idea of the perfect coat, that she didn’t care for how she got there, even if she had to skin a hundred puppies, to someone who developed a lifelong phobia and hatred of Dalmatians after they scared her mother off a cliff, weakened her character a bit, I feel.

If she had been one of the other from the get-go, that would have been fine, but it was switching between that wasn’t.

Anyone can achieve great things, even if they come from nothing… As long as they secretly have a great background and heritage out the wazoo. Or it is pre-ordained and has to be them; all other attempts doomed to failure.

The initial message might be fine, but it then undermines itself.

It also usually self-cleans quite nicely through the flushing mechanism. Hence the noise, since it pushes water down the sides to clean it.