AlexanderRM

don’t get me wrong i enjoy clark & bruce’s friendship a lot but early relationship stuff where they’re just hissing at each other like stray cats. love that.

bruce is like ‘this guy CLAIMS to be benevolent but he’s a frighteningly powerful alien visitor who is obviously not being honest about who he is and where he comes from so i do NOT trust him and clark is like ‘this guy dresses like a bat and punches people. what the heck.’

‘i pulled 4 all nighters in a row and i have successfully linked ‘Superman’ to his civilian identity ‘‘‘Clark Kent’‘‘ and he’s definitely not being honest about his lifestory, his birth documents are all careful forgeries but his school and college records all seem to be real? its all extremely shady, ALSO he keeps showing up at events I’m attending in his reporter identity so he’s clearly trying to psych me out. why is he doing this. what game is he playing.’

*looking through the cowl w x-ray vision* ‘oh you’re bruce wayne lmao.’

#clark is chill but is extremely confused as to why billionaire philanthropist bruce wayne is running around dressed as a bat #bruce is genuinely unable to fathom the idea of superman actually having a day job and a real life and *actually* being a journalist #“why are your educational records so intricately forged?” #“uhhhhh… they’re not? i actually went to school bruce.’ ’#’‘why do you keep showing up to my events in disguise?’ ’#’'i’m not in disguise??? it’s my job????’ ’#’'who is your accomplice?” #“you mean lois?????? she’s my wife???????” #“suspicious…”

Bruce, cornering Clark at an event: I know what you are and I know you know who I am. why are you everywhere I go? are you following me? why are you doing this to me?

Clark, who keeps covering events in Gotham bcos no-one else wants to do it and he’s the new guy so he’s gotta: *deep sigh* ok-

Bruce: who is your accomplice? what does he know?

Clark, very tired: that’s Jimmy, he’s my photographer, and he literally doesn’t know anything

Had a dream that I was going to band camp on the moon and to save fuel they had us leave our instruments and clothes behind and only use the camp uniforms and equipment. When we deboarded the space shuttle my middle school band teacher handed me a spacesuit and a box that looked exactly like a box of pasta with the little cellophane window, but instead of pasta there were very tiny woodwind pieces and it said BASSOON on it. "BASSOON: add water."

like this

Ok this is all fine and good but op why the hell were you marching a bassoon

I dunno, but I like how this was the most unreasonable part of the dream to you.

We have GOT to stop being assholes to people with receding and balding hairlines. There's not a single person that it can't affect. It affects trans men, particularly on hormones, it affects trans women, particularly those not on hormones, it affects people with endocrine issues, something that's becoming more prevalent and common, and it can affect people without a particular cause, including cis women. It's a normal part of being human and we NEED to stop dehumanizing and humiliating ppl for it

My bf started losing his hair in his early 20s and the effect it's had on him is devastating.

He's an actor and he was dropped by his agent after he stopped hiding his hair loss. The roles he was cast in narrowed and shifted from more heroic characters to villains, and eventually he became so miserable about it that he stopped going to auditions altogether.

He used to enjoy dyeing his hair bright colours, and he lost that means of self expression. It alienated him from his own appearance, which knocked him back in coming out and exploring his queerness. The way he talks about it often feels dysmorphic. He says shaving makes him feel like he's "rotting" - like he's "scraping the mold off [his] head".

I've seen drunk people and teenagers yell at him in the street and mock his baldness. I've seen people come up to him and slap his head or touch it without asking for permission. I've witnessed this behaviour from other trans people and women who I know would absolutely kick off if he took such a degrading or entitled attitude towards a part of their body, but seem to think it's OK to do it to him.

Since going bald people perceive him as more masculine. He feels people are more suspicious of him. Women are less likely to approach him. Folks are quicker to put him in a box or misread his behaviour as aggressive or threatening, when the reality is that he's neurodivergent and can't conform to rigid social norms.

Baldness is a heavily gendered characteristic. If someone is conventionally masculine enough and/or is protected by other intersecting powers and privileges (eg wealth) then baldness can reinforce their maleness and the harm to their social standing is minimised. But if their performance of maleness is complicated by something like queerness or disability, it creates a dissonance. They have what is perceived as a hypermasculine trait standing in sharp contrast with their refusal/failure to perform normative, idealised masculinity.

And that's how baldness is typically read - as failure. Especially when it exists outside of wealthy, successful, heterosexual masculinity but tbh even there too - just look at all the jokes about Jeff Bezos' baldness or Elon Musk getting hair plugs. It's similar to insulting Trump over his weight. Like yeah fuck those guys but all you're really doing is revealing to the fat and bald people in your life that you think their bodies are deserving of mockery.

And God help you if you're a bald woman. All women with receding hairlines are at a huge risk from transmisogyny.

Sorry for the essay. Baldness is absolutely a body neutrality issue. It's an ageism issue, and a trans issue, and I WISH there was a broader recognition of this.

I was really surprised at how many bald people there were when I got my first white-collar job. It was an aging, nerdy workforce in a large uncool company, and the of majority guys who worked there were bald or balding, and right at the beginning I was trying to figure out, like, is baldness associated with being interested in that kind of work or something? Because it was by far the highest concentration of bald guys I'd ever seen in one place.

Eventually I figured out that no, this is basically just the prevalence of baldness in general. It's like 50% of the population by middle age, with visible thinning or hairline recession topping out above 80% IIRC. The reason I was seeing a lot of it is just because the workforce there skewed older than I'd been used to, and because these weren't the kind of guys who would go to great lengths to prevent or conceal it. Add to that the fact that the rate at which it's depicted is vastly lower than the rate at which it actually exists, so you end up with a very distorted idea of prevalence when your acculturation relies heavily on media and celebrities.

Worm milks an enormous amount of emotional and thematic mileage out of not being remotely parodic.

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about; I recently started watching The Venture Brothers, and in the fourth episode there’s that sequence where The Monarchs henchmen and Baron Underbeit’s henchmen are shooting the shit over beers while trying to breach the Venture compound, talking about their various traumatic backstories and the roads they walked to become henchmen. The scene is extremely funny, because it’s a bunch of guys in ridiculous costumes killing time while trying to organize an assassination, but it’s also kidding-on-the-square; once it milks some black humor out of the mere idea of expendable minions having rich inner lives and incentives driving their behavior, the show actually does evolve into more nuanced examination of the expendable henchman dynamic.

Worm, though, does something different. The book takes the idea of “henchmen” extremely seriously from the start, subtly treating it as foundational to the game from day one and inescapably tying it into the books themes of selfishness, desperation and coordination problems. As early as the second or third chapter, Taylor is casually identifying the collapse of Brockton Bay’s blue collar sector as the reason the city is so attractive to supervillains; because they know the city is full of disenfranchised workers who are desperate enough to take jobs as goons. Her father, a Union Man to his core, brings up the idea of his dockworkers defecting to hench for Uber and Leet as something laughable- but there’s a very real desperation underpinning that framing. He’s desperate to find something to talk to her about, desperate enough that he’s willing to try and laugh off a real societal problem that he feels like he’s personally failing to address, so the beat isn’t really comedic.

In fact, there are almost no comedic beats about where Henchmen come from; the question of where villains find goons is spun around from a hundred different angles; it’s always some combination of desperation, coercion, career militarism (from coils people) or, in Skitters case, forged-in-fire loyalty used as a characterization tool for the protagonist. There are a few characters who behave as though henchmen exist solely to enable their superhuman setpiece violence, and every time the narrative treats that attitude with disdain and revulsion. Worm doesn’t go out of its way to emphasize the absurdity of henchmen; instead, it views them through the lens of community organization, organizational cohesion and movement building. In arc 11, Lisa puts serious thought into the ideal squad dynamics for the minion-backed sortie to merchant territory, and that’s just business. In a show like The Venture Brothers, these same ideas would be expressed through a gag where a mastermind gripes about the surprising difficulty of managing the petty office politics of the death squads.

huge congratulations to drugs for continuing to win the war on drugs

From: The Workers of the World To: Capital

COPE

I'm reading the SCOTUS affirmative action opinion for a longpost. The Justices are being vitriolic in the footnotes.

"did not!" "did too!" but for very serious adults:

(then again, if the alternative is arguing for 200 pages, "did not" might be fine too, it's been a long day and we're tired)

Press X To Doubt:

I like this model, it has two good properties that state or parental ownership don't (without additional patching not inherent to the concepts): The parents can refuse to serve as trustees, leaving the state to find a replacement, or if no replacement is found the child presumably starves; and a teenager not old enough to run their own affairs can still reasonably be trusted to spot when a trustee is doing a very bad job, and get a different one.

Every year on July 8th at about 11:15 UTC, approximately 99.164% of the world’s population is between dawn and dusk.

by u/GiddySwine

That’s one way to remind yourself that the Pacific Ocean is about one third of our planet’s surface!

Also that Australia was made up for clout and doesn’t actually exist.

Me, spouting off armchair theory: You know, it’s far more common throughout history and among many cultures for people to live in large extended families.  Where there’s no expectation that children will attain adulthood by moving out and living alone or in nuclear families, the burdens of homemaking and childrearing and eldercare are lessened, and cultural ties are strengthened.  Perhaps modern Westerners are foolish for embracing a lifestyle that isn’t centered on this kind of interdependence.

Me, interacting with my actual family: I FUCKING LOVE ATOMIZED INDIVIDUALISM

I see your call and raise you, a proper extended family has developed a close relationship through a lifetime of constant daily interactions and comes with social cues and a social culture built from thousands of years of embodying the solutions to the problems caused by living together in tight knit groups. We’ve lost and forgotten these things and no longer understand how to structure the family and interact with each other using the social tools that make such a lifestyle quality.

Atomized individualism allows us the flexibility to live like uncultured swine without the constrains that would make living together viable and without killing each other.

@missing-found I raise you, as someone who actually still lives in a culture where an extended family is still the norm, it was always actually this terrible but women and servants (who were underpaid and treated terribly) were expected to take the burden of smoothing things over emotionally and physically too.

Maybe it’s different elsewhere but that hasn’t been my experience. And I’m saying this as someone who prefers to live with other people.

Again breaking my own ‘cation but this is A Thing For Me: 

I’ll raise all of you: there has never actually been a point in human history where we all lived in magical healthy harmony of perfection and fulfillment. This is not something humans have ever had.

Atomized individualism is absolutely potentially isolating, creating loneliness, mental health problems based in isolation, alone in the burdens of homemaking, etc, etc etc! 

and! at the same time!

Large extended families living in integrated groups have always been potentially toxic, coercive, and deeply unhappy, and always contained at least one subclass of people (if not multiple) who ended up doing unrecognized and unescapable emotional, psychological and physical labour. 

These things are both true at the same time. Neither one of them cancels the other out. 

The flat bench-line of human history is not happiness. It’s not fulfillment. It’s not widespread mental health and actualization. 

It’s just survival. So people don’t need to have been happy and fulfilled and deeply healthy in their groups in the past - it just has to have balanced out on the side of survival, more or less, most of the time. 

Humans are absolutely social creatures: we need other people, and there’s absolutely nothing about us intended to be Alone and Solitary. In fact overwhelmingly through history, “all alone” was more or less synonymous with “you’re gonna die horribly soon.” 

That does not mean that the networks of other humans we lived in were naturally harmonious, healthy, supportive, emotionally functional, etc, etc, etc. In fact if you take five seconds to look at most history and folklore and stories and life-experiences, we almost always weren’t! Globally! 

It was just better than being all alone, where you died and your life fell apart. 

Were SOME communities more or less supportive and healthy for more or less the majority of the people? Sure. That still leaves times when they weren’t, and people for whom they were poison, because “more or less” and “the majority” still leaves people who just didn’t fit, or weren’t like the rest of the community, or had wildly competing needs. And that’s WITHOUT getting into anything one might actually recognize as “right” or “wrong” - that’s just about stuff where there’s no moral value attached. 

Like loud people in groups of quiet people, or vice versa. 

There is a fundamental challenge to being human that involves trying to create, maintain and nurture networks of support and connectedness and help that are at the same time strong enough to be supportive - to offer adequate hands to all the burdens of human life - while at the same time aren’t restrictive, rigid and mismatched enough to be absolutely toxic. 

In order to rise to that challenge one of the things I think it is absolutely critically important to realize is: 

Yes! Atomized isolation/individualism can be a pretty crappy way to live!

So can integrated “traditional” societies based around extended obligate networks! 

Both options often suck and have huge potential downfalls and failure modes. Neither one is inherently and automatically going to produce Correctly Adjusted Humans because absolutely nothing about how humans came to exist is predicated on us ever being Correctly Socially Optimized and Emotionally Adjusted Humans. All it had to be was good enough for there to be another generation of humans who a) survived and b) perpetuated the cultural norms into the future and the generation after that. 

Whether leaning more on the individual or collective side is going to be better for any one given person is gonna depend hardcore on their context: 

- is the collective context they have available a good fit for them?

- is the collective context safe for them?

- are they in a position and life situation where they NEED continual contributions from other humans in their lives, or no? 

- what’s their personality like? what do they find easier or harder? 

And that’s gonna end up with a whole lot of cost-benefit analysis going on. 

But there was never a time when Everyone Was Totally Happy With The Big Integrated Families And Things Were Perfect (but then we BROKE IT!!!). There absolutely have been MANY times when your choices were “figure out how to fit into a big integrated network OR DIE” so people sucked it up and figured out how to live. But that’s not the same as “we were all ~*perfectly happy and adjusted*~”. 

On the other hand there’s DEFINITELY been historical contexts where being able to Get The Fuck Away From That Toxic Hellpit You Were Born Into was way, way better!  … that at the same time doesn’t mean that humans aren’t massively wired as social animals and that there aren’t huge detriments to being isolated. 

[Now ideally, right: we figure out how to both skillfully interact and create support networks that ALSO AREN’T harmful to the people involved, and reflect the needs of those in them for both company and autonomy. This is gonna take a hell of a lot of careful behaviour, careful thought, and flat out work, though, cuz humans are fucking messes at the best of times. *palms up shrug*] 

/disappears back into Sitka and work

I always fucking hate that Benjamin Franklin attribution that ‘any society that will give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.’

Because like what we’re getting at here is the very real fact that authoritarians love to use security as an excuse to consolidate power and you gotta stay vigilant.

But also that’s an insane thing to say, because the entire process of living in a society of any scale is one of balancing trade-offs of liberty and security, always trying to optimize and never ever reaching a stable equilibrium, because there are so many factors involved and so few of them are static. If you really believed that you’d go live alone in a hole in the ground.

That’s probably why Franklin’s adjectives were actually essential and temporary. “Those who would give up essential liberty for temporary safety”. He’s not arguing against the tradeoff at all, he’s saying there exists a point where you are no longer trading one against the other. It’s only insane because you misquoted him.

the default way for things to taste is good. we know this because "tasty" means something tastes good. conversely, from the words "smelly" and "noisy" we can conclude that the default way for things to smell and sound is bad. interestingly there are no corresponding adjectives for the senses of sight and touch. the inescapable conclusion is that the most ordinary object possible is invisible and intangible, produces a hideous cacophony, smells terrible, but tastes delicious. and yet this description matches no object or phenomenon known to science or human experience. so what the fuck

this is what ancient greek philosophy is like

Even unto missing the obvious defaults 'tactful' and 'sightly' for touch and sight.

wait what

Wild, he's real although scholars disagree on whether he ever got an audience with the Pope.

The Battle Hymn of the Republic is probably most familiar as music; but in translating it I found that it is really excellent as poetry. Consider that famous phrase, "the grapes of wrath"; it is a dead metaphor now in English, killed by overuse out of its original context. Seeing it with the fresh eyes of a different language let me appreciate the power of the image: The grapes of wrath, from which are made the wine of wrath - heavy on the tongue, hot in the belly, a fire in the blood; the wine that soldiers drink before battle, that makes them charge the cannon's mouth. It's a phrase anchored in physicality, if you don't slide right past it through familiarity; "He is trampling out the vintage" - I am pleased that in Norwegian I was able to add an additional verb here, "han har trampet ut en årgang og av vredens druer smakt". I don't know if Mrs Howe had drunk of the wine of wrath herself; but when she wrote that, she'd surely had a glass or two of the mead of poetry.

I have dropped the refrain "Glory, glory, hallelujah", which relies for its best effect on being sung by several hundred deep male voices marching down a dusty road with a battle at its end; it is fine music but does not really contribute to the poetry of the words alone. I've kept, however, the concluding "…is marching on" that punctuates each verse, making it "…er i anmarsj", slightly archaic Norwegian that fits well with the religious imagery. This turned out to be the most difficult part to illustrate, in a poem in which I struggled much more with the images than the words; in the end I gave up on getting any sort of metaphor for "truth marching on" through StableDiffusion, which I used for the triple-alpha rhymes, and instead put in contemporary paintings and drawings. At any rate this serves to mark the refrains as distinct from the main verses.

The final line, which Howe wrote as "let us die to make men free", is now often sung as "let us live to make men free", presumably on the theory that dead men do not actually accomplish very much and the real goal is to make the other side's soldiers die for their cause. The argument has undoubted force. On the other hand, so many of the men who sang these words in deadly earnest genuinely did die to free the slaves; died by the hundreds of thousands, by bullet and canister and cholera. My translation, somewhat unfortunately, avoids the difficulty entirely with "menns frihet er vårt krav"; the triple-alpha rhyme scheme is a cruel master here, and I could not find any way to work in either life or death.

Jeg har sett med egne øyne Herren komme i sin makt; han har trampet ut en årgang og av vredens druer smakt. Han har sluppet asgardsreien løs og lyn fra sverdet brakt. Hans sannhet i anmarsj!

I hundre vaktmenns leirbål har jeg sett ham klar til kamp; de har reist for ham et alter her i aftnens røk og damp; en rettferdig dom jeg leser, og jeg hører bødlens tramp: Hans dag er i anmarsj!

Jeg har sett hans skrifter flamme i stål og krigersk mot: ``Forakt skal dere hevne, og jeg tilgir deres bot''; la helten, født av kvinne, knuse slangen under fot, For Gud er i anmarsj!

Vi har hørt trompeten kalle, det blir aldri mer retrett; han veier alles hjerter, for hans domstol er vi stedt; Vær rask, min sjel, å svare ham; føtter, vær beredt! Vår gud er i anmarsj!

Han ble født i liljens skjønnhet langt der borte over hav; i hans bryst var det en glorie som hver enkelt nåde gav. Han døde for menns synder, og menns frihet er vårt krav! For Gud er i anmarsj!

> #wait I didn't actually post this thing?

No you did, I recognize all of this including your complaint that triple-alpha rhymes kill most good translations of “let us die to make men free”

Then I apologize for spamming my mutuals, but what on Earth was the post doing in my drafts folder?

Hanging out :D

well now it’s probably also buried in *my* drafts (or possibly queue) but I also just listened to it and i wanted to say thank you! I love it!! I’m generally not big on poetic readings of songs but you’ve got a great cadence to your voice OP

Thank you! Like erotica, poetry is currently an art that must be done for its own sake, because you're never going to get paid any money; so every word of praise is balm to my soul.

Try some Norwegian-to-English! It is of course possible that my reading is best when you don't understand the actual words, or in my slightly singsong native Norwegian. My channel is mostly English-to-Norwegian.

it's always kind of funny to me when people talk about the "natural state of society" because like, there are only two definitions of "natural" that i think are useful (ignoring mathematical etc definitions)

and clearly it's incoherent to talk about a society as being unnatural under definition 2, so unless society is secretly run by spooky ghosts every civilization that has ever existed is natural. this doesn't mean they're good!

edit: I guess if aliens came and forced us to live a certain way you could argue that's "unnatural" but clearly that hasn't happened. like, there are many cases where a society was forced to change by an outside society, but that outside society itself was still made of humans!

Every society results from human action, and sometimes also from human intent. But some have to work harder than others to remain in a stable state. (Pun definitely intended.) I think there's a reasonable sense in which Sparta is "less natural" than Athens: The peers have to work much harder than the various oligarchs to keep the helots (respectively poor but not literally enslaved Athenians) from revolting.

Athenian democracy and what bureaucracy it had was really carefully designed to manage a sizable city with a large hinterland while also impeding the rise of tyrants or oligarchies. And then they also had to keep a third or more of the population enslaved on top of that.

The Reddit CEO referring to moderators as "landed gentry" is amusing considering that as volunteers they are literally the opposite of people who get paid without working.

Carpenter, actor, pot dealer... that man has range.

insert that one post about the Millennium Falcon vs. The Enterprise being an arctic research ship vs. your local weed man with a van and a shotgun

Don’t tell the most recent immortality cult about this. It would break their clichéd little hearts.

Yeah the funny thing is how the “state of the art” consistently refers to whatever field’s particularly prominent and cutting-edge at the time.

It’s been alchemy in medieval Europe and ancient China, electricity in Revolutionary France, extremely low-temperature liquid circulation in the rocket age, data storage in the computer age, now it’s biotech because of course it is.

In 16th Century Spain with the whole Fountain of Life thing it was fucking western hemisphere cartography.

I found this post while searching through my bookmarks* and 8 years later it’s still a good post

*for this TheUnitOfCaring post which I go searching for every time an animal consciousness debate comes up

Nobody likes to mention that the Nazis were the first people to get a man-made object into space

tired: humans colonizing space is bad bc it has the word “colonization” in it

wired: sending man made objects above the karman line is fascist

really interesting tidbit of information from If Books Could Kill–in the early 20th century, before courtship moved into the public sphere (i.e., became dating something like we think of it), the norm was that guys would go over to girls’ houses, basically to hang out, chaperoned, in the living room or something. but this was never something that the men initiated: as both a practical matter and one of etiquette, the process was overseen by women and the girls themselves, and it would have been the height of presumption for a gentleman caller to invite themselves over

which is essentially the reverse of the 1950s and onward dating norm of men asking women out! but it also wasn’t a function of some greater degree of gender egalitarianism or anything, and afaict was basically a side effect of women not being allowed to go into public spaces unchaperoned.

@thosearentcrimes

i’m probably overstating the degree of segregation of public spaces by sex–even in jane austen you have scenes of women going out in Bath and stuff–but the primary venue in which to meet and spend time with young men seems to be mostly either formal events like balls, or them coming over to your house to hang. i’m sure this does vary by social class.

by the early 20th century it’s just, like, your mom or older sister sitting with you and your beau in the evening in the living room or parlor or w/e. but the podcast also points out this is a very gradual process of change which started in like the late 1800s and wasn’t really complete until the 1950s. ergo an apparently really funny joke from the 1920s about a country boy asking a city girl if he could call on her, and when he arrives at her house she has her hat on.

the thing that really put the knife in this set of norms, at least in american courtship culture was the automobile, bc it gave young people a private space to spend time together in (and not surprisingly young people and cars were the subject of a decades-long freakout)

(this is part of a broader discussion of how dating norms are treated when they’re in flux, bc the book that is the subject of this week’s podcast is sort of a fossil of 90s gender norms/dating culture. but it amusingly retrojects rather conservative 1990s dating norms back onto, like, the Paleolithic, and every moment of history in between, which prompted a discussion of just how silly that is, and just how much these things are in flux in any given decade)