Wonder Woman 1984

Wonder Woman by Joe Bennett

tozozozo

you can read the rest of the strip by this artist here, i highly recommend it >>

here are a few more that really resonate with me

we are all just so normal about him

Spectacular cover for World’s Finest: Teen Titans by Jim Cheung and Jay David Ramos.

I have $24 to last me til Friday, what should I buy with it?

a pallet of ramen noodles

I hate ramen noodles tho

hmmmmm bees?

Are you suggesting that I eat bees for a week

This is roughly what I make sure I have in my kitchen all the time along with rough estimates of local prices (MN). I buy a lot of things when they’re on sale and stockpile them. 

instant oatmeal packets with fruit in them - $3 probably and this can be breakfast all week and maybe even a lunch or dinner too since you usually get 10 packets

bag of rice - $2-3 depending on size. 1 cup dry rice makes enough for about two meals depending on what you add in. if you get cheap rice, rinse it before cooking

canned beans - usually under $1 per can - mix the can with your rice and you have a meal. chili-spiced beans will make bean tacos. Rinse non-spiced beans before adding to anything.

Tortilla - usually around $3 but you get like 8-10 of them. Tacos, wraps, and quesadillas are all fair game here

lettuce - $2 max around here, either a head of something or bagged precut depending on preference, use as a salad or on tacos

protein other than beans of some sort - probably $5-7 for meat, $2-3 for eggs. sometimes I can get bags of frozen chicken breasts in this price range and each is usually 2 meals if I add in a bunch of veggies. fry/scramble eggs and add to any of the options. 

your favorite stir fry sauce - $3ish

vegetables - $5ish. literally anything that you can 1. fry in a pan and 2. you’ll eat. fresh carrots are usually pretty cheap. get frozen if it’s cheaper and you’re strapped for cash/prep time on this part. 

alternative to stir fry:  pasta (~$2), fresh tomatoes (~$2), cheese (~$3). 

cheese and fruit if you have extra - look if your store has loyalty cards for free that you can load coupons on for cheese there’s always one it seems like.

ahh thank you!!!

Reblogging because there’s never knowing who’ll need it.

Adding also: the single most nutritious food on earth is potatoes in their peel. Potatoes + some milk and butter = everything you need. They don’t last all that long, but they’re fairly cheap and the quickest cheat to “How do I not fuck my body up.”

(Cooked potatoes’ll last a while in the fridge. Potatoes nearing the end of their useful lives? Cook them to half-done first, figure out what to do with them later.)

Easiest baked potatoes: slice thinly but not paper-like, spread like cards, brush with oil (a silicone baking brush is totes worth the little it costs), spread salt and pepper (a little less than you think you’d like), cover with foil, stick in oven or toaster-oven at 150C for 40min. (If you have the patience, at that point click up to 180C, remove the cover and add 10-20min.) Reheats well, lasts in the fridge longer than it’ll take you to nom.

Dead-Animal-Free Whole Protein: some legumes + some grain. AKA rice and lentils, or rice and beans. (Maybe some fried onion for flavor; onion’s cheap and stays good a descent while. Fried onion makes everything taste better and keeps forever in the freezer, so frying up a bunch and keeping portions is not a half-bad idea.) (If going for the beans option - lentils are cheaper around here but fuck if I know what it’s like in your area - dump some tomato sauce and oil in; canola or soy are best health-wise, and far cheaper than olive; avoid corn.) Oh, what does instant couscous go for in your area? It keeps for fucking ever, it’s usually cheap, and it takes well to any and all added taste.

If you get to choose, black lentils taste the best and need the least soak-time (0-20min), green lentils are best for cooked stuff and red lentils are best in soups. (Red lentils + potatoes + root vegetables of choice + spices; cut into small pieces, cook, run through the blender if you wanna [stick blender’s awesome], freeze in portions.)

When possible, get instant soup mix. Get the good instant soup mix. (The kind that’s not made primarily of sugar, yeast or both. The rest is optional.) Dump 1/2tsp (or more, but start on the low end) into couscous, or chicken, or sprinkle over potatoes being stuck in the oven. Whatever. It’ll make most cooked-food-type things taste better. And again, lasts forever on the shelf.

If  you can have eggs (goodness knows they’re sometimes expensive), dump some tomato sauce in a pan (tomato sauce lasts forever on the shelf), add some oil, onion/beans to cook in it, hot peppers if you wanna, then when it’s nearly ready crack an egg or two in. Hard-boiled eggs last a remarkably while in the fridge, so when eggs reach near the end of their usable lives, just hard-boil and stick in the fridge. (Have eggs as often as you can, particularly as you have brain-shit going on. You need all the eggs, salt, and 60%-or-more chocolate you can get. Brains are made of cholesterol and salt, so folks with neuro or other brain shit need more of both. Potassium is also aces. You know what has the most potassium? Tomato paste.) Grated cheese keeps in the freezer for ever. Grated cheese will make a lot of things taste nicer. Preserved lemon juice keeps forever in the fridge. Grated cheese + oil + lemon = instant and awesome pasta sauce that’ll liven up the weeks-old dry pasta in the fridge. Slices bread also keeps well in the freezer. Try to have half a loaf or a loaf. Dry bread gets cut in cubes, mixed with oil and the aforementioned instant soup, stuck in oven at lowest until properly dry, then kept in an airtight jar to add to soups. (Over-ripe tomatoes come cheaper. They get turned into soup or sauce, then frozen in portions.)

this is a very good post but why are we glossing over the fact that the alternative to ramen is bees

i have it on pretty good authority that bees are not an affordable eating alternative to ramen.

Seriously, bees are expensive

Trufax. 

And speaking as someone who is also living off oatmeal, beans, and brown rice, if you need recipes, I have them! 

Today I made 16 bean soup with chicken sausage and it was crazy good and I got 8 servings out of the one batch (froze half). I usually get the cheapest beans I can find, and GOYA bags of beans are usually $1-2. I soaked them overnight,rinsed them, and threw them in a gallon lidded saucepan with 2 boxes of chicken stock (also on sale for $2), two bay leaves, sauteed green pepper, onion, and celery, some garlic from a jar, about two tablespoons of dried herbs de provence,and the “fancy” bit was adding $6 bourbon and apple chicken sausages. You can actually sub veg stock for chicken and skip the sausage and make it vegan and it would still taste great.

Oh and I’ve been doing steel-cut oats. I don’t buy the name brand ones, I just pick whatever store brand/generic I can get for less than $4. They take about ½ an hour to make, but they’re super tasty and I make 2 cups of dried oats at a time with dried cranberries and that’s breakfast for 4 days at least. 

I’ve also been making black bean soup, red beans and rice, and curried potatoes and chick peas. I got 100 quart and pint take-away containers from Amazon for $20 and they all stack neatly and are perf for one serving of whatever.

Additionally, depending on where you live, whole rotisserie chickens are something like $4-$7 and are easily 4 - 6 servings of protein and on TOP of that, if you stick the carcass in a ziplock bag and then the freezer you have excellent soup makings. Using bones in soup literally squeezes all viable vitamins and minerals out of the suckers. Soup made from lots of bones is great to keep around if you get sick, it’ll feed and sooth you relatively easily and as you get better you can add noodles. ON TOP OF THAT, a quarter to a half cup of soup broth added to a lot of dishes also adds those nutrients PLUS flavor.

Here’s my “How to eat for a week on $30″ post.

don’t forget Good and Cheap: Eat Well on $4 A Day

Yall are clutch for this lmao cuz ima need this for about the first month after I move

Reblogging cause who knows what your followers are going through rn

guardian angel

i never knew that i was pirating anime and manga as a kid like i genuinely just thought it was free online

aplatonic aromantic asexual polycule

coworkers

One thing my aunt said to me that shook me to the core is “Do you want to live, or do you want to die?” She said it to me when I was bawling my eyes out in January over life shit and she said it so intensely with this hard glint in her eyes. It snapped me out of it immediately. She said she would repeat that question to herself every single day when she was in recovery. I repeat it to myself all of the time now, as soon as I start spiraling into negative self-talk or rumination. It is so intense but so real. Do you want to live, get up, make something out of the day, or do you want to die, because that’s what you’re doing stagnating in your depression and rumination. It feels like splashing cold water on my face

Dozens of NYC Subway riders, fresh off a Robyn concert, singing “Dancing On My Own” while waiting for the E train. (Video by Triszh Hermogenes) 

I’m reblogging this again because the absolute joy in this video is something I haven’t seen in such a long time that I’d forgotten this aspect of humanity.

Τhe Horror of Living by Tyra Kleen , 1907

Fountain in My Garden, 1904, Henri Martin

Medium: oil

ahem Prints available in store

The Shadow’s motivation

As an addendum to my post where I talk about his backstories

The Shadow’s motivation, despite how often it seems to challenge or befuddle writers, I’d argue is actually the simplest thing about him. It’s right there in the speech he gives in The Shadow Unmasks, when he unmasks completely before Slade Farrow and tells him exactly who Kent Allard is and used to be

“The war ended. I found that aviation offered part of the life I needed; but it provided neither the action of battle, nor the keen work of the secret agent. I rejected the idea of becoming a soldier of fortune. I considered warfare an uncivilized institution except when absolute necessity required it. “I saw such necessity in the field that others had neglected. Crime was becoming rampant in America and elsewhere. Only a lone foe could pierce that cordon “I chose that mission.” 

The Shadow does what he does because he can. He sees a need, and responds to it. He learned and did much while travelling the world as a spy and aviator, and decided to return home and apply his skills to fight crime. Whatever personal enjoyment he gets out of it (and it’s definitely there) is secondary to the goal of helping and protecting others, as he makes it very clear he does not wish for war or bloodshed of innocents or the necessary conditions for him to operate, and does not remotely fuck around when it comes to protecting the innocent. It’s the same thing in the radio show.

This doesn’t mean he doesn’t have motivations beyond that nebulous sense of goodness. Despite how sparse the information on his background is, we get reasons given for why he does the things he does - a strong sense of purpose, compassion for those he wishes to protect, a drive that made him excellent during the war but restless in normal life, a loss of lives under his protection alluded to at least once, a taste for action and danger and theatricality, he knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men, etc - but his motivations and thoughts are largely kept from us, and there is no large defining moment in his backstory that makes him who he is. 

There is no death of the Waynes moment or loss of Uncle Ben moment. Even his disfigurement, something you’d think would constitute a pretty dramatic superhero backstory of itself, seems to have only made him more effective at disguise and is something he wields as a surprise tool against evildoers in a couple of stories. 

He may be stoic, manipulative and harsh, he may have a theatrical streak ten miles wide, he may enjoy the dangerous parts of his work a little too much, and he may have done things in the past he’s not proud of, but ultimately, this is a character who never needed any more motivation than just being able to do the right thing because he knows what it is, and doing it, regardless of whether or not he is a good person or a hero. He buried his past to live for the future of others because that’s all that matters to him.

The Shadow just is. Because, above all else, he chooses to be what he is. 

“The Shadow does what he does because he can. He sees a need, and responds to it. “

In this vein, the Shadow has quite a few similarities with Superman. While Superman’s powers do have an origin, the reason he chooses to use them for good do not. Like the Shadow, he does good because he can do good. 

Oh absolutely, and I definitely plan to getting around on that when I write about the two.

Superman is another character who doesn’t really have that kind of big dramatic chrysallis backstory the way Batman and Spider-Man do. Which sounds weird, considering his backstory begins with a planet exploding and all, but Superman doesn’t really have that “elevator pitch” tragedy.

He was a good person who had good parents that gradually taught him to be the best he could and who eventually decided the best way to do so would be to become Superman. Which does pose a challenge to writers who want to convey his background/origin but don’t have something as quick and punchy to work with as motivations driven largely by operatic traumas like dead parents or cosmic freak accidents (even though Superman has both).

The Shadow, while we know nothing about his upbringing or really anything concrete about his life prior to enlisting, was clearly driven to do good and help others through secretive means long before he became The Shadow, as he was faking his death and dressing in black to rescue prisoners out of camps way back in the war and possibly before that. We get a sense of the circumstances that drove him to become The Shadow but nothing really instant.

If nothing else, that’s something the two have in common.