Serenity Dee: SFF is still maladjusted

I hate this Injustice ass idea where Clark is the one who is closer to the line than Bruce is.

If anyone is going to snap between the two of them, Bruce is going first.

at that point Clark had already used his godlike power to murder one of the people he loved most in the world, and I always figured that him crossing that line, even unknowingly, is what broke him

because, as Clark said in Kingdom Come, when you strip everything away down to the very core of who they are, the one thing that defines both of them is that they don't want to see anybody die

it's not just a core belief, it's right at the center of what drives every decision they ever make

because they know, intensely and personally, that death is the end of hope, that once someone is dead, everything that they could be is gone

and time and again we see that this faith is not misplaced, that their greatest enemies sometimes become temporary allies, fighting to save the world they both share against even greater threats, or even fully redeem themselves

the Harley Quinn cartoon even gave us a redeemed Joker, although I don't think that's something the main continuity Joker is capable of doing; he's very consciously and deliberately a monster, and he continually makes choices to make the world worse, because the only thing he wants, the only thing he will ever want, is to watch the world burn

Uh huh, I mean, the Wrap are generally quite good about this kind of thing I've found, so this is PROBABLY the case...

But if WB is pressuring DC Studios to focus more on a Bane/Deathstroke movie due to an action movie starring two dudes is seen as a safer bet box office-wise than, say, a new Wonder Woman movie, I'll be extremely disappointed.

Because, among other things, Supergirl isn't a BAD movie which while mostly my opinion, it's also one seemingly reflected in the audience score and the opinions of most of the other folk who I've spoken too who've seen it. It just seems we can't just have films just be good, or just okay with good bits these days.

And yeah

If you want a perfect example of why I have absolutely no interest in the godawful worthless trash that is superhero cinema anymore?

Look no further than the fact that this dogshit genre is literally going to give us a movie featuring a character who raped a child while trying to murder teenagers...but has yet give us a single movie featuring ANY worthwhile LGBTQ representation

DC and the MCU have, to date, not made a single film featuring ANY queer or trans representation of any worth or value. There has been NOTHING but the same tedious nauseatingly cishet dogshit regurgitated down the moronic viewing publics throats over and over

But it will make a movie featuring Slade Wilson the mass murdering pedophile who got his daughter addicted to drugs and abused her so badly she cut her own eye out

like, I haven't bothered watching a Toy Story movie since 3 and only reluctantly did I watch that one, because I thought it was already played out after 2, so I was only vaguely aware of a new one being on the way, but as soon as I saw a headline about the new movie opening against a major Pixar release I knew it was fucked and of course the lesson they're going to take away isn't "don't fucking open against one of the most popular franchises of the past 30 years and counting" but "we need more dudebro movies"

I am eagerly waiting for the third Spider-Verse movie and if they'd actually stuck to the plan of making Carol Danvers the central character of the MCU following Steve Rogers going off into the sunset I might have actually cared about the new Avengers movie, but instead they're bringing him back after he got his happy ending

The community living next to the largest datacentre park in Europe say the scorching summer heat has grown unbearable. On days like Wednesday, said Nabeel Nawaz, the store manager of a Chaiiwala franchise in the centre of Slough, the heat is like something “pinching your body and burning your skin”. What is harder to establish is whether this heat is just the result of the climate emergency, and the growing industrial sprawl across London, or whether the dozens of energy-hungry datacentres that have sprung up are also contributing to the problem. Ten miles (16km) west of Heathrow, Slough has become one of the largest datacentre hubs in the world, hosting an estimated 30 to 40 huge facilities, many of them on a campus in the centre of town. These – owned and maintained by companies like Equinix and Digital Realty – serve dozens of clients, including the world’s biggest tech companies: Amazon, Google, Oracle and Microsoft. More are still to be built in a planned development on the edge of the same campus. Emerging research – including a preprint of a paper led by researchers at Cambridge earlier this year – suggests datacentres create a heat island effect, pushing up temperatures in their immediate vicinity by an average of 2C, and as much as 9C. This is because of the cooling systems required to keep down the temperature of sensitive electronics, including cutting-edge AI chips. The government has proposed using the waste heat from datacentres to warm thousands of homes.

Leaving superheroes alone to plan tends to not go well for the bad guys.

I do love how they made Twoflower into a loud American tourist in the BBC adaptation, though

RUN

The other two, not so much

ever

stop being pissed with Dan Didio and Geoff Johns for resurrecting Barry Allen and retconning Hal Jordan's fall because they decided that their childhood versions of legacy heroes are more important than story arcs, character development, or the one comic book death that nobody but them wanted undone

like, the words one of them used were along the lines of "we had to get Barry and Hal back as the lead in those titles where they belonged"

Barry's sacrifice was meaningful and it's why Wally is my favorite Flash because he had to build his own legacy and meaning and overcome all of his self-doubt

Bringing him back not only undid so much of that and caused Wally to disappear from continuity for years and came on the heels of Bart's pointless and unnecessary death

Hal's fall from grace and his redemption through self-sacrifice were powerful stories and his run as the Spectre flowed naturally from it, and it was also by far the most interesting thing he ever did

And both stories demonstrate why I keep saying that the problem with superhero comics is that nobody's story is ever allowed to end, even when we have legacy characters like The Flash and Green Lantern that have a built-in explanation for a legacy being handed off

hell, for a time Clark had stopped being active as the primary Superman of the main universe because Jon became the primary Superman instead, which is cool and interesting and desperately needed

and then there's Batman, where the heir apparent to the cowl is no longer Dick but Damian, which is actually good development for Dick in establishing himself thoroughly as Nightwing without being obligated to one day take up Bruce's identity

but it's also been consistently shown that Damian as Batman is going to be even worse than Jean Paul Valley

his costume doesn't look half as cool as any of Bruce's and he carries around a gun

I GOT THAT REFERENCE

......

like, they were profoundly formative for a certain age of queer women, but they were also ultimately chosen for the band and packaged for the titillation of unqueer men, and AFAIK neither of them was actually queer, although given that they live in Putin's Russia still, last I knew, it wouldn't be safe for them to be any flavor of out

I could be wrong, but the way Diana's and Kara's faces are rendered are very much at odds with the rest of the piece but very consistent with slop machine images

Three people simultaniously said 'Wendy Courduroy' and

Sean: .....yes. absolutely

Elijah: 100 percent.

The Shire is excellent farming country, with consistently good weather, and only one tough winter in living memory; hobbits like to produce large families; they’re resistant to disease, rarely violent, and encounter few dangers. It is usual for hobbits to produce many children, so that (for example) Bilbo and Frodo are unusual in both being only children, with no siblings, and not having children of their own. All of this should point to a population that increases every generation if not doubling outright. Young people (and their ideologies!) should rapidly outnumber the old with an ever-increasing effect and impact on society. However, the Shire has a surprisingly stable history; it never seems to increase or decrease greatly in population, and the bell curve of age seems… demographically balanced? There certainly isn’t a conflict from rising young bloods challenging the middle-aged reactionaries; there’s no unemployment; there are no housing crises or waves of emigration, or even a tendency for young people leaving home to marry. Meanwhile, not only does the Shire not suffer from internal pressures, but it remains obscure and hardly noticed in global politics.

What makes sense here is that adult hobbits form a loose group. Four parents in a polycule, between them all, may produce four children. All four parents claim to have four children. An outsider would assume this meant the adults had eight children.

Hobbits therefore are not especially fertile or fecund. They simply have large families. Much of their interest in genealogy is due to the complex relationships of blood-kin, hearth-kin, love-kin and pledge-kin, who must all be carefully tracked and measured - not just because you need to make sure that you don’t climb into bed with an un-permitted degree of blood-kin, but to track family alliances and carefully quantify the precise level of thoughtfulness to put into the proper present to gift your father’s lover’s lover (too much implies a degree of intimacy that might upset the polycule.)

Thus, while a hobbit matron may tell a startled dwarf that she has seven sons, she might only have borne five of them herself, and have one hearth-son by her wife, and a pledge-son of her first husband’s. There are between three and four fathers involved at various stages of production, from conception to pledge-duty, but there is debate about the precise number of fathers, as one child was festival-conceived and therefore provisionally pledged to the Brandybucks until more distinctive paternal traits should materialise. It’s expected that four of the sons will be uninterested in women, and their contribution to family life will be in raising hearth-children and pledge-duty. However, this level of detail is normally negotiated later in conversation, as a mutual overture of friendship. So she’s just clear and simple: yes, certainly, she has seven sons. Yes, they’re all hers. Yes, that’s fairly normal - yes, hobbits like big families. How big? That’s really hard to say! Well, about thirteen hobbits live in her house… er, she has forty-three nieces and nephews. Yes! She has nine siblings, that’s correct, but some of them are still babies themselves..

In this way, a bewildered dwarf might assume that hobbits are absurdly fertile, producing an average of seven children per couple, at an absurd pace.

When in fact, with about half of hobbits never bearing biological children, the population of hobbits is pretty much always the same.

Tl:dr, hobbit population works perfectly well, both internally and in the perceptions of outsiders, if the majority of the Shire is gay, they’re all polyamorous, and they all firmly claim to be parents of high numbers of children. Of course Frodo fathered Sam’s kids - he named them! They were pledge-kin but not hearth-kin, as Frodo needed a lot of quiet and stability in the home.

In short, all of the hobbits enjoyed achieving even larger families on their adventures, legally and without argument or debate. It’s free real estate. If nobody else is going to sibling these losers, we will. (The condensation of so many entanglements at once also legally made Pippin his own father-in-law.)

Gandalf never explained.

Inheritance follows parent-child pledge as the primary consideration, with matrilineal descent as the secondary. Pippin would have been bewildered to gradually understand that Denethor held his two sons in such odd and different standing :-/ hobbits don’t recognise kingship so it would’ve been very upsetting and disappointing to Pippin to understand how Denethor stood in position of sworn-father to a whole city of people without even being slightly fair to his younger hearth-son. Aragorn is demonstrably much better dad-material and therefore had Pippin’s vote. Pippin, by virtue of being an excellent father-in-law to a spectacularly promising young son-in-law, also considered himself a better candidate for king of Gondor than Denethor, by outranking him in Dad Competence - but was too busy by the time he realized this to point this out .

HAPPY JUNETEEEEEENTH FROM THE BLACK CAT!! 🖤 🖤🖤🖤

Cool Flex

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<3 I FUCKING ADORE MYSTIQUE SO MUCH <3

"Why did I do this?