Nimona’s entire stick is transforming. Lots of her problems come from transforming. Lot’s of her solutions come from transforming. What is Nimona’s main power? Staying still and doing what she is told. No it’s transforming lmao.

Nimona is introduced with very similar identifiers of being queer (pink hair, haircut, clothing) it isn’t very subtle, nor does it matter because it is only one form. The only identifier that we get throughout the film that Nimona is a particular animal is the color pink - which in certain scenes, we are reminded is a choice.

She is violently persecuted because she can shapeshift, nearly to the point of suicide. Sound familiar? She could not shapeshift, but to her, that is basically the same thing as dying. Then she does, and she is “free”. It is a rather blunt analogy for gender dysphoria & transitioning.

What is Nimona’s gender? Does a fear have a gender? She’s closer to a primordial force than a human, but she still shows a preferred form. But it isn’t static. She is explicitly non binary.

People relate to the film because it demonstrates feelings that are similar to the situations that they go through, not because it demonstrates the exact situation that they are in. There are other reads, but this is a prominent one. Much like Celeste, the source material was written without an explicit understanding of what these feelings were - it is only with hindsight (this film) that these reasons are spelled out more clearly.

Further reading: https://time.com/6291748/nimona-shape-shifting-trans/

The existing plan should take care of the significant majority of costs. AWS charges out the ass for data egress, and while I don’t know the billing specifics, this instance moves roughly 1TB a day, and the majority of it is static images by virtue of well, images. It was mentioned that this covers half of existing costs upwards of 1-2k. So whats the obvious solution? Don’t use AWS for storage or transfer.

Cloudflare and a significant chunk of other providers are part of something called the Bandwidth Alliance (which AWS declined to be a part of) and most importantly, these providers offer S3 compatible object storage without data egress fees. Lemmy uses something called pict-rs; on default settings, uses local storage that has to be part of the VPS that you rent. Enabling object storage allows you to move storage away from the VPS itself and onto a different provider - one that does not charge data egress fees. (Easy money? idk) Ideally, you also get edge caching as a bonus.

So what about the data transfer not associated with images and can’t be easily remedied? Different VPS providers have different benefits. Digital Oceans lets you customize your VPS to the Nth degree, Hertzner offers up to 20TB of transfer with it’s VPS offerings. While I can’t vouch for them myself, that should be enough to cover a whatever other thumbnails and other data that can’t be shoved into object storage. Either way, still cheaper than AWS.

As for AWS load balancing, uhhhhh standard nginx/apache config? I’ve only used nginx as a reverse proxy but I’m not paying for it.

Not touching DB management with a 10 foot pole

TLDR: AWS is great for small projects and my relatives drooling over A40’s but they charge for egress, and other QoL services that typically get used by companies with deep pockets.