Deadend

-found an axe formely belonging to a friend who is now in jail

-axe (stolen)

-earrings made out of dentures

-flavored condoms

-a quilt

-hello kitty sweater (stolen from a DIFFERENT ex-friend with a felony charge)

-deer spine

-baseball sized wad of human hair

-""sex apron""

-uranium glass plate

-pile of non-uranium non-car glass

-rollerblades

-complete phantom of the opera cd set

-magic the gathering cards mold-ified into a brick

-lego millennium falcon

-a CUTLASS??? (for "self defense")

-the back bumper of the car

-an entire fucking ant colony

and finally, perhaps the most disturbing,

As you can imagine, this makes googling anything basically impossible. Especially after the super hero themed slurpee cups the chain does off and on.

Can you tell me anything about him? I remember reading he left a calling card that was a mirror, but with bars painted on it so it looked like the viewer was in jail, but that’s all I can recall.

Folks let me tell you you are NOT prepared for how batshit this story STARTS. Like, I promise you. However insane or absurd you think things happened in the Golden Age. Or however dumb you think you've heard people's hair brained schemes. You aint seen NOTHIN' yet. I am about to tell you perhaps the WILDEST shaggy dog story in the entire superhero canon.

So take a seat and read on.

(An image from a STAGE PLAY made about this man. a CONTEMPORARY STATE PLAY)

Daniel Dyce was a successful lawyer in the city of Fort Wayne, Indiana. Known for taking on hopeless causes based mostly on his own personal sense of empathy. That's how he wound up making friends with recently convicted lifetime inmate at the newly built maximum security Westmoor Prison Jacob Horn.

Now, from the newspapers I was able to dig up, Horn was about as classical a scoundrel as you could get. Do you know how much grand larceny you have to do to get a LIFE SENTENCE without a SINGLE murder on your record? It's a lot! But Jacob Horn was also known as a rather charismatic man and so he convinced Dyce to take his case. A case that was lost pretty resoundingly because it was about Horn's 17th strike at that point but still Dyce did his best.

Horn then made Dyce an offer, because the two men coincidentally looked very similar. Horn asked Dyce to PRETEND TO BE HIM while Horn temporarily ESCAPED PRISON to be present at the birth of his son. Swearing that he would return and take his rightful place in jail.

DYCE AGREED TO THIS. HE AGREED TO TAKE THE PLACE OF A LIFETIME SERVER AT A MAXIMUM SECURITY PENITENTIARY. FOR A CRIME THE CRIMINAL *DID* COMMIT. BECAUSE HE FELT SORRY FOR HIM.

So Dyce sets this stupid, STUPID plan into motion using his lawyer privileges to change clothes with Horn while they were having a private discussion (SUPER illegal, btw, even if this had gone to PLAN it was still a BAD PLAN). And Horn rushes off to the hospital to see the birth of his son. And then, god almighty above or something curses Fort Wayne with the worst rainstorm it had seen in the 20th century to that point. So the ragged criminal on foot blunders out into the road with less than 0 visibility and gets creamed by a truck IN THE HOSPITAL PARKING LOT.

The body that looks like lawyer Daniel Dyce, wearing Daniel Dyce's clothes and carrying Daniel Dyce's ID is identified as Daniel Dyce. So now the REAL Dyce is stuck in maximum security lock up and decides to DIG A TUNNEL ALLOWING HIM TO ESCAPE AT ANY TIME. But instead of using that to say, clear his name, or escape, or ANYTHING. He decides to use this tunnel to become a mystery man about it! Foiling crimes in and around the prison while returning to his cell (#711, natch) for morning roll call.

He kept this up for TWO. YEARS. The only other mystery man he EVER interacted with was Uncle Sam up until the point where he caught a bullet in the prison yard. His name was only cleared because the prison obviously did a blood test on the freshly lain out corpse and that blew the latch open on this whole sordid tale. Which means that if he had found some way to make that happen TWO YEARS BEFORE he could have done LITERALLY anything else with his life.

Let it never be said that the mystery man generation was not ABSURD

Level 1: browser extensions

This one is basically impossible to get wrong, or at least to get wrong badly enough that it causes any problems.

Get Firefox, or a Firefox fork like Waterfox. If you use a fork, make sure it's one that will let you use add-ons. On a PC, pretty much any Firefox fork will take add-ons, but on mobile devices, many don't. Iceraven is one that does.

Get the add-ons uBlock Origin, YouTube Sponsorblock (if you use YouTube), and FBCleaner (if you use Facebook).

uBlock Origin comes with a built-in list of filters to block ads and trackers, but you can add your own filters to block any specific element of a website you don't like. You know those goddamn floating frames on fandom.com sites that block half the screen? Now you can zap 'em.

Sponsorblock uses crowdsourced timestamps to automatically skip sponsor spots and self-promotion in YouTube videos. Never listen to anyone say "hit like and subscribe" or "Raid Shadow Legends" again.

FBCleaner hides all content from your feed except posts from people, groups, and pages you've actually chosen to follow.

Level 2: leaving enshittified services

The software that's become standard over the years in a lot of fields is steadily selling more of your data, showing you more ads, and pushing you to buy more expensive subscriptions. Time to tell them to get fucked.

Dump Adobe apps for Affinity or Krita. Drop Microsoft for LibreOffice. Change your default search engine from Google to DuckDuckGo or Qwant. Use OpenStreetMaps instead of Google or Apple Maps.

Level 3: network-level DNS fuckery

DNS, or Domain Name Service, is the thing that tells your computer where www.website.com is actually located. By hacking your network's DNS you can force it to tell your devices that ad-hosting domains don't exist at all. Some of the steps on this one can get pretty technical, but because you're doing all the difficult stuff on a dedicated device, you can't really fuck up anything that seriously.

Get yourself a Raspberry Pi (a cheap older one like a model 3B will work just fine for this purpose), and follow a guide like this one to get it set up running AdGuard Home. AdGuard, like uBlock, has built-in filter lists, but you can also add your own if there are specific domains you want to block.

Once it's up and running, you'll need to change the DNS settings on your router to point to your AdGuard service. This is different for every router but will always start with logging into the admin panel with a password printed on a little sticker somewhere on the router.

With that done, every time a device on your home network looks for ads.website.com, it'll get back a message that says "sorry, can't find it", so it won't be able to load any ads.

Level 4: Android-specific DNS fuckery

Because AdGuard runs on your home network, it can't block ads on your phone when you're away from home - and what's worse, your phone will sometimes remember the addresses it got when you were out and about, and ads will get past your AdGuard wall even when you're home.

To avoid this, get AdAway for DNS-based ad-blocking directly on your phone. The easy, but less seamless, way of using AdAway is the "local VPN mode", which doesn't require you to do any mucking about with your phone's operating system.

Level 5: automated media piracy

The best way to stop seeing ads on all your streaming services is to stop using streaming services. There are loads of ways to do this, but the best ones involve setting up what's called an "arr stack" (Google that for setup guides) along with nzbget and a usenet account. Most of the time you'll want to set this stuff up on a dedicated device - an old laptop gathering dust in the closet is a great option, or you can grab something used from a charity shop or a local electronics recycler.

The great thing about usenet is that unlike with torrents, you don't have to do any sharing from your computer, so you're in a lot less legal jeopardy - legally speaking, distributing pirated content is waaayyy more serious than accessing it. I pay about £3 a month for a secure, high-bandwidth usenet service.

Once you start getting your own collection of media on your own computer, use the open-source media library manager Jellyfin to browse and play things from basically any device.

Oh, and don't be a dick. Pirate all you want from big corporations, but please pay independent small-time creators for their work.

Level 6: fucking with Android

Android phones are a lot more locked-down than they used to be, but depending on the device you own you can still do a lot of messing around under the hood. Note that if you get something wrong while doing this, there is always the possibility that it will turn your device into a paperweight.

Before you buy a device, check where it sits on the Bootloader Unlock Wall of Shame. Once you've bought it, check the xda-developer forums for guides on how to unlock it and "root" it (gain admin access) with Magisk.

Once Magisk is installed, you can add modules to do all sorts of cool stuff, including using AdAway in "root mode" which makes it basically invisible.

You can also install YouTube ReVanced, which will do all the ad- and sponsor blocking stuff we took care of in your Windows browser a few paragraphs ago. Be careful: there are a lot of fake sites out there pretending they're associated with the ReVanced project which might be injecting malware into their downloads. This Reddit post has the official instructions and links.

Also, try out the modded version of Facebook from APKmoddone, which will block most of the same shit as the FBcleaner add-on from earlier. There's always a possibility that modified apps like this are doing something dodgy, but I've never had any issues with this one personally.

Level 7: fucking with Windows

This one is scary because it can seriously fuck up your shit if something goes wrong, but some really cool people have actually made it very simple to strip all the bloat, ads, and spyware out of Windows. The tool I use is ReviOS. Start reading at https://www.revi.cc/docs. Basically, you'll need to download a tool called AME Wizard and the ReviOS "playbook" that tells AME what to do. Read the documentation before you do any of this.

Level 8: switching to Linux

I'm not going to pretend this is an option for everyone. Half the software I use on a weekly basis isn't available on Linux. But if you can switch? Do it. These days, Ubuntu - one of the most popular flavours of Linux - is built with people switching from Windows in mind, and a lot of things will be pretty intuitive. It also has great documentation and a huge community you can go to for help if you're confused about stuff.

My Girlfriend: Don't say whatever your thinking you little pervert