Blogging from your attic.

Scanned from “Shiny’s Rubberist” no. 17. 1994-1995.

I sincerely believe we miss Clark in the aesthetics of office routine, in the style of a ridiculous sitcom where an alien dude is trying to work a real job.

At the same time, I'm sure he shouldn't write about himself as Superman ever. Precisely because he works as a journalist, because he's focused on the lives of people—who are mysterious, multifaceted, and incomprehensible to him. He studies them, listens to them, writes about them, and often his texts are very… peculiar to read; people feel like they're being examined from a very, very distant perspective.

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In my AU, Kryptonians communicate through complex systems of sounds and light frozen in ice structures (including icy breath—not a superpower, but an organ needed for communication).

That is, they never developed symbolic systems—letters, numbers, and hieroglyphs—their cognitive abilities are very poor at processing them. Clark really can't read without glasses, which distort his vision quite severely. And at the end of the day, the sheer volume of text literally hurts him.

Letters can confuse Kryptonian perception. Lex knows this well, but he doesn't tell anyone that the massive use of text patterns in Lex Copr's design code is meant to hurt the alien creature. For humans, it's simply bold, albeit slightly overloaded, design; for a Kryptonian, it's a conceptual burn to the brain's structural-semantic system.

Why the hell does Clark work in a place where he's surrounded by a gigantic amount of text?

Perhaps for the same reasons why people lift weights, skydive, and deep-sea dive: they passionately do something they're seemingly completely unsuited for, and it makes them happy.

Am I breathing?

Have I blinked?

Are my feet touching the floor?

Am I touching something typically fatal or painful?

Have I damaged the environment in some unexpected way?

Am I responding to sensory input not available to humans?

Oh … I’m not breathing…

Have some opening action scene where Superman shows up to stop crime and the robbers try to run him over at top speed.

Obviously it doesn’t work and Clark stops the car - wrecking it a bit and stunning the criminals inside but not harming them.

Then the scene repeats much later but this time Clark is distracted, stunned or suffering some phlebotinum effects - anything that causes him to not react.

So much of what he does, both as Clark AND and Superman, is for other people’s comfort.

The way he tilts his head to show he’s hearing something you can’t.

The way he dresses for weather he can’t feel.

The way his glasses obscure the too-intense blueness of his eyes.

The way he lifts his feet over cracks, and ducks under overhangs.

The way he eventually purchases oven mitts and other protective gear to wear before touching dangerous substances.

The way he leans into blows so people don’t shatter their hands.

The way he tries to only respond to words and tone, rather than heartbeat, increased/decreased sweating, breathing changes, ‘inaudible’ mumbles, and all the other things people don’t know they’re communicating.

A Clark that forgets to do those things is fascinating to observe.

(I’d also love to see more of various Karas and Kon dealing with similar things, because their perspectives are all so different.

Kara grew up without powers, but not around humans, and so her blind spots would be really different.

Scan I took from Seiichi Hayashi’s book “Japanese Woman,” 1981, published by Sanrio.

Amy Winehouse photographed by Diane Patrice in Camden, LDN

THE HEARTACHE OF CHAOS - INFECTION AU Harmony Status :

We found a few...except. For one. We need to get a hold of the harmony stones and fast! Or atleast a cockatrice, I don't know how much longer the others can take the madness, it needs to be stopped, one way or another.