tardigradetheking

They also make JJ sound too..."good" for lack of a better word. Jonah is a dick with a heart of silver, maybe gold if you spitshine it. Even if he IS fully supportive, he's still an ass.

A good example of how to voice their + Robbie's dynamic:

She’s too scared to come out to her aunt and friends at school, but after she gets her powers and starts fighting crime- it’s easy for Parker to introduce herself as Spider-woman.

gangle makes a twitter account

reblogs are appreciated

This morning I learned analog treadmills exist, and today I got one!

This is literally just a belt that rolls. You step on it and it slides down. Its light enough that I can move it around myself and folds up to only take a little floor space.

This would have been about $200 new. I found a listing on FB marketplace for $25 that had only been posted earlier today, and now it's in my house! Previous owners kid had it for PT after ankle surgery.

Feed your friends. Feed your loved ones. Feed the people who help you. Feed your neighbors. Feed your community.

At its core, the edgelord trope that society would “break down” into violence the instant the cops stop answering the phones is a myth built on cynical belief that humans are - at their core - violent, selfish, cruel animals that are only kept in line with the violent enforcement of “law and order.”

Hell, it’s a myth built atop another myth that the police - the legitimate purveyors of state violence - are even competent at all!

Considering their abysmal track record for actually solving crimes and observed reluctance to put themselves in harm’s way, there’s hardly a case to be made that they are actively keeping society from descending into chaos. And if you think that’s woke anti-police nonsense, bear in mind that once, when the cops in New York did a work “slowdown”, crime went down.

Because see, there’s a second half to the apocalyptic “breakdown of society” myth, the one that appeals to a certain group of people. It’s the part where, now that society has become the State of Nature, the truly strong, independent, well-armed men of action have carte blanche to “restore order” with brutal, justified violence.

Apocalyptic movies are a popular genre because it takes the standard Hollywood power fantasy and gives it an adrenaline shot of compatible politics: libertarian, every man for himself, Übermensch crap. As it depicts the end of the world, with all the pornographic spectacle of chaos and human cruelty, it tells its audience that you won’t succumb when the rest those dumb, weak masses perish. Whether it’s zombies, plague, climate disaster, or solar flares making our cellphones stop working, you specifically (yes you, Kyle!) will rise above it.

And when it does, the strong and rugged will survive and start over. Make things how they “used to be.” Presumably a nice, pure, uncomplicated world suspiciously absent of all those “weak” folks that had been muddying the waters and getting in the way, before. The ones that had prevented the naturally strong men from reaching their true potential in the Old World.

To the people that truly buy into this garbage power fantasy, the inevitable apocalyptic collapse isn’t something to be feared, but prepared for.

Putting a readmore because this is gonna get long, sorry not sorry this post activated an interest of mine

They’re going to be the people currently claiming they’ve got to protect themselves against same, and they’re not going to last very long.

Why not?

Well, as shown by libertarian societies and some preppers who’ve actually done test runs…they’re shit at it. The preppers in question had all kinds of canned goods AND FORGOT A CAN OPENER. Libertarian communities—boy, if that statement isn’t an oxymoron!—routinely find themselves LESS safe because they made no provisions for water or safety, like using bear-resistant trash cans.

They’ll die quickly because they won’t have adequate first aid; because when their winter-weather gear tears they won’t know how to fix it; because when the canned food runs dry they’re going to need a crop preserved on the shelf and a crop in the ground and they won’t have either. And they don’t have the social skills to integrate into the communities that formed while they were being Tough Manly Individualists. Oh, they can shoot guns? A lot of us can. Oh, they can drive trucks? So can my dad, and he won’t balk at helping to darn clothing. Oh, they can carry heavy stuff? Guess what my job is.

The main character pretends to be a postman and the very idea that there’s still a governing body somewhere inspires people to work together and make that a reality.

Chaos, rampage, disease, yadda. But the fascinating bit is seeing clusters survive, and the idea of ethnogenesis; pockets of folks who have a cohesive approach to the multivariable state of maintaining being Cozy, Together, become the “seed crystal” pattern origin of new regional microcultures. The first book is the Pacific Northwest, year one; the second book jumps to year ten, and starts exploring a couple of other intersecting regions.

Cool things include:

a coven of renaissance faire wiccans and folk musicians east of Eugene revive the croft and covenstead system of the eighteenth century Scottish clans, with herding, farming, hunting, and archery;

a ex-Ranger bushpilot trying to get his client family back from the Idaho crash on their way from the ranch in Montana to their estate in the Willamette Valley generates a growing Mongol/Scythian horsefolk mercenary contingent, slowly crossing to the promised farmland;

the University of Oregon using light-based microscopy to track diseases and run a university-centered society in Corvallis;

a bunch of ranchers in the plateau turn their local stockman’s association into a regional sheriff-based senate, and adding crossbows to their cowboy vibes;

Native folks surviving better than most, due to traditional cultural skills (author is a white dude doing his best, my Indigenous ass gives him a solid c+, which leads a lot of the class if I grade bell curve);

a lay-jesuit scholar of Norman history convinces street gangs in early-collapse Portland to create a warrior caste and endentured labor society based in the witan and baronies, and seizes the Multnomah county library as his palace, using forced labor, concrete, utility poles, and barbed wire to build fortress stockades.

Even the villains succeed through togetherness, just not a consensual one for a major fraction of their population; a morman prepper’s house is an initial boost that gives the wiccans more time to get their first crop in, and the pantry is available because the old couple ran out of insulin. The local biker gang turned outlaw bandits differ as to what cruelties they’ve let be comfortable. Some clans of survivalists are the in-world equivalent of orcs, driven grief-mad through the psychic-break of having been compelled to cannibalism through hunger, mixed with the toxic ramifications of having used particleboard, plywood, and treated lumber to cook with because of staying in the cities as they became ruined, and the urban forestry getting denuded through desparation. There’s a strong note of cities becoming plague and devastations hubs pretty quickly without functioning infrastructure, while not demonizing the reasons why we build cities to begin with, for the efficacy of community.

You know when a story has an interesting premise, but kind of just falls apart in the execution? That's kind of where the Kevin Costner film, the Postman, lands.

His second, less famous post-apocalyptic flop after Waterworld, the Postman has kind of an intriguing idea that is kind of let down in the execution that I think could actually work really well as the premise of a TV show rather than as a kinda slow, sadly dull three hour movie.

The Premise: In the post-apocalyptic world of the year 2013, it's your standard fractured landscape of small, unconnected settlements being bothered by roaming bands of bandits and raiders.

Costner's character (he decided to both star and direct the film, which might have been his first mistake) climbs into a post van to get out of the rain, and puts on the uniform of the skeleton postman inside to stay warm. When the weather gets better, he decides he might as well deliver it to the town down the road, where one of the residents is actually among the people the protagonist has post for.

This leads to a series of events where Costner's character basically uses his outfit to try and scam people into thinking that the US government is coming back in exchange for food and shelter, only for people to give him post for other nearby towns, other people ask to be sworn in as postal workers themselves, and they effectively end up rebuilding society by accident as news, goods and information are able to travel between communities once again.