Adventures in Life

me: my dude we just woke up!! It’s time for wakefulness and doing things and Productivity

Because it's a massive East Coast city but the property values are probably like $200 a month for a three bedroom apartment, and most Gothamites are like, "Hey, Bane never swore to break my back."

And here's the thing: you're not just moving out of Gotham City. You're moving into the rest of the DC universe. And it has hero-based power scaling.

Oh, Metropolis looks fucking great. But it gets invaded by aliens and robots and demigods, because Superman is there.

Wonder Woman's tangling with gods.

You go to Central City, and some Reverse-Flash motherfucker runs backwards from an alternate future and kicks your balls off at the speed of light.

You could move to the West Coast, and oh, an entire city just gets exploded by Cyborg Superman or some shit.

How about you move to Indianapolis, or Cleveland? Haha, no. They have no protector during the alien invasions, and you're in Cleveland

So stay in Gotham. Sure, you have lunatics, but you know that if you had a gun, you at least have a chance against the Joker or Riddler. Mongo of War-World would crush you. But Gotham just has creeps, and you know you have a chance. Even Bane, R'as Al-Ghul, Killer Croc, and Mr. Freeze are just slightly altered dudes. Oh no, Poison Ivy is going to kiss me to death! Who gives a shit, you kinda wanted to go out that way anyway.

I think it's all about perception. Gotham City has crime. But when Ares sends his undying legions to march upon the mortal realm and Wonder Woman has to punch all of them, people don't internalize that as "crime." That's "a crisis" or "a religious event" or at best, terrorism. Same thing when Superman has to stop Brainiac from shrinking Metropolis or whatever. That stuff is objectively more dangerous but it's on such a huge scale that "crime" is not the word for it. The cops don't involve themselves in this at any point. But the stuff Batman deals with is like, robberies, assaults, gang wars, serial killings. All his villains commit actual crimes, so they go into police reports, which end up as statistics. So when someone compiles all this data, oh look, Gotham City has the highest crime rate in the country, yet again. Forget the fact that 10% of Keystone City's population had their skulls crushed by invading superintelligent gorillas. Who cares that a random guy in Opal City accidentally teleported the entire state to Hell after he found out the hard way that he was born a wizard. Those are not crimes. There's nothing in the police recordkeeping app's drop-down menu for a Gorilla invasion. Closest thing we've got is Random Chimp Event.

Last week, the Trump administration quietly released a sweeping new federal rule that would use funding threats to force institutions across the country to reject transgender people. The 400-page proposed regulation would codify the administration's anti-trans executive orders into binding federal policy, imposing a blanket prohibition on federal funds going toward "gender ideology"

The proposed rule, formally titled "Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance," rewrites the government-wide framework governing all federal grants across every agency. Among its most consequential provisions, it requires that before a federal grant recipient can receive money, the award must pass a "pre-issuance review" conducted by a political appointee—not a career expert or peer reviewer—to ensure it is "consistent with applicable law, Federal agency priorities, and the national interest." The regulation explicitly instructs these appointees to screen for "denial by the recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic." [...] An institution that acknowledges transgender people exist—through its policies, its training, its healthcare, its bathroom access, its HR procedures, its name-change processes—could be deemed to "deny the sex binary" or to “support the notion that sex is mutable” and have its federal funding blocked.

This torches everything. And I do mean everything.

A very abbreviated list of its ramifications include (but are not limited to):

ending funding for ALL DEI related initiatives

allowing the government to terminate grants at any point for any reason

preventing researchers from publishing, going to conferences, and being part of academic societies

requiring that topics must support the president’s agenda.

What this means, and if anything I’m under selling it, is the death of science and research in America. It allows the government to restrict any topic they please at a whims notice, putting officials who have no background in the topic in charge of deciding funding continuity. It controls what gets researched and if/how researchers are allowed to share their discoveries. There are no books to burn if the government never allows them to be written. This is fascism plain and simple.

Public comments are not a vote, it is a chance for you to say "here is an issue with this law I think you need to address" and provide justification for legal challenges if it goes forward:

"Comments raise the bar that agencies have to meet when making a rule; “if an agency fails to adequately respond to significant, relevant comments in a final rule, members of the public may seek to challenge the rule in court on that basis and claim it could be struck down.ˮ"