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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • I love the version of Superman where he growing up and is friends with Luthor and he’s like ‘I cannot tell him my secret because my dad would disapprove’ and it’s got accidental closeted queer vibes.
    And there’s this comic book (not in the same continuity) where Luthor is this mad genius who escapes from prison easily and Clark interviews him and he’s like “I like you Clark, you’re so humble and down to Earth, but I hate Superman who is the opposite of that.”
    and then Lois likes Superman more than Clark, at least to start with, in some versions I think.
    And then with Brainiac there’s the possible storyline of ‘this computer has a lot of information stored on my lost culture but he is also an existential risk to all sapients everywhere in the galaxy ahhhhggg’.
    And how will Clark deal with an environment where everyone is hostile to immigrants when he is one himself and also dedicated to upholding the law?
    And the first comic where he interacts with Batman is actually fairly good: Batman threatens to bomb people if Superman unmasks him and Superman is like ‘oh shit, he is not lying, I can hear his heartbeat’, but Batman was actually threatening to explode himself. And the cartoon where Batman is fighting Brainiac and his costume gets ripped to reveal he was Superman all along was hilarious: “I did not predict this possibility.” The Justice League series in general (part of the same continuity) was pretty good actually.

    I like the potential stories there. There’s so many emotional possibilities. Stories where he just punches stuff are indeed boring. He is, frankly, under-utilized as a character imo because many writers don’t understand that, or think the solution is to make a version of him that is evil which still involves him punching stuff, or because they’re scared to actually touch on political issues like immigration or queerness. (can you imagine how many people would explode if Luthor was an ex-boyfriend for both him and Lois and they bonded over how shitty Luthor was as a date lol.)


  • The thing about his movie is that he was like, almost okay. Iron Man I was about him learning that selling weapons = bad. He could have continued his moral development.
    Instead, we got him fighting Captain America over a very stupid implementation of ‘oversight’ (coming from the guy who refuses to let gov. oversee his iron man development), being creepy to some random boy he just met (actually twice - first Peter and then some kid I don’t remember; in a better set of movies I don’t think Peter would be very thrilled to realize Iron Man was advocating for Peter to get outed in a national registry), and having a snit fit about how he doesn’t want to help Unsnap people who died because he personally is OK with his future with his daughter who may or may not be a robot he built to mime having humanity.

    What makes him really insufferable for me is his fans who think Captain America is EVIL for daring to snub poor Tony, and that Tony should go date Loki (no I’m not kidding; while I am happy with Loki being queer, I really can’t see the Marvel Universe Tony being a good date for, well, anyone ever, nor Loki being a good date until he works out his genocidal tendency issues at which point he threatens to become alas a much less interesting character).


  • While arguably Batman could use his wealth better (especially in versions where he’s richer than Luthor, because you don’t get to be richest guy without being a major asshole who does things like force workers to pee in bottles), the other guy/gal also has a point. The comic book universe isn’t our universe, it has aliens invading and Spwecial People who have to be fought by other special people. Batman is basically super-powered the way he can run a marathon, run a chemical analysis and synthesize a new cure for something overnight, and jump 10 feet, they just pretend otherwise.

    You might enjoy Harley Quinn where Batman gets arrested for tax fraud.


  • As someone who has actually tried to get government assistance, I suspect it was removed for being misleading, not because they actually believe there is ‘no healthcare in the US’. Don’t strawman people.
    Poor people often cannot get healthcare, such as via lack of documentation, lack of means to actually get to the places they need to go, etc. In my case, the government invented a completely fictional job for me that I did not have and declared it meant I was not eligible, and gave me a time limit to respond that expired before I had the actual chance to respond. The window for applications is a very short time period and I live with people who frequently do not give me my mail before winging it some place random, so it can take me a week to find my own mail.
    Someone living without a mailbox would have had zero opportunity: in that regard, I was ‘lucky’.





  • I’ve had some heavy ideas about this.

    Random chance actually means it is very likely there are random clusters of users even in small groups who are closer together than others who could do more locally together. Some kind of mechanism to help figure out if we have a critical mass of protestors/mutual aiders/whatever (without giving away those protestor’s names) for a project would be a good idea, and wouldn’t necessarily have to be very complicated. Maybe a single page that just asks for location and what kind of project you are interested in?

    There are also some forms of work that lend themselves really well to being online. Coding, writing, news, encouraging people to vote, sending money to workers on strike. I firmly believe the most effective way to combat unethical companies is simply to start and support worker owned companies where every employee gets a vote on their wages, and ‘starve’ the big companies. I found myself looking at the massive amounts of money raised and wasted in political campaigns by single dollar donations and found myself thinking - damn, with a million dollars, you could start a really small company with that. The second most effective way is probably striking, which, yes, you need people on the ground for that.

    We could use an ethical version of Amazon, with a collective of shops that people can visit (the offline side of warehousing is a whole other bundle of issues), and an ethical Paypal. I know that credit unions exist, but I don’t know of any credit union that has a Paypal-like API and easy convenience of simply clicking to pay for things. Uber and other apps. There is a huge amount of labor that we could ‘take back’ simply by providing another venue for people to practice it. Unfortunately, I don’t think the fediverse way of doing things is quite appropriate when it comes to systems dealing with money. It’s one thing to duplicate posts or ads for content for sale, but you don’t want to duplicate credit card information. Open source it maybe and use ‘semi centralization’; the Paypal-esque site can handle logins and money, and the Amazon-esque sites can perhaps do some form of federation and handle actual showing of items.

    TLDR: it is definitely possible to do quite a bit online, and I think work reform has some avenues via it that have been severely under-utilized and neglected in the information age, as we tend to think of action as just being about protest. Protests can certainly be useful, but should not be our sole course of action if we want a paradigm shift. I find it extremely striking that when most people talk about action, they almost always mention protests and strikes first, if they mention anything else at all.

    I actually had a much longer post, but it complained it was too long. So I think I will make my own thread.