our protag is the oathsworn sibling-lover-champion of the empress who gets his/her gender forcibly changed according to what empress thinks is convenient or fun. a cute cat with wings is here. Have You Got All That. okay good. language is the first and purest weapon of imperial domination.

Lee like: listen. evil space wizard empress and her core gang of minions. all of them are outrageously hot. all of them are in Some kind of current or former sexy situation. at least one is a traitor, at least one has been in prison for a thousand years, at least one is possibly a spaceship.

just finished reading Code and Codex by Yoon Ha Lee (new! Yoon Ha Lee! space opera! out this month!) and man. no one else does the combination of indulgent (complimentary) and very, very clever quite so well.

actual article: fleeting reference to diagnoses exceeding projections, then many paragraphs on how not enough is being done to support people after diagnosis BBC headline: "ADHD over diagnosed"

actual article: fleeting reference to diagnoses exceeding projections, then many paragraphs on how not enough is being done to support people after diagnosis BBC headline: "ADHD over diagnosed"

Yup, or I guess "everyone is violent and selfish, they're just too scared of the consequences of acting on it, which someone with power wouldn't be." At least some of these people are telling on themes.

"what if Superman were evil?" is just reinstating the real world norm. yes, most of the time bad people do bad shit and the rest of us are relatively helpless to stop them. thanks for also giving them laser eyes, I guess.

it's a power fantasy in that the premise is always "what if a genuinely good person were never really helpless?", which in a world where good people often feel helpless in the face of overwhelming evil is something to cherish.

people sometimes complain that Superman is "boring" or "hard to write," because he's *so* powerful that the story can't meaningfully constrain him, but that's missing the point. he's constrained by his own morals: the drama comes not from whether he can win, but how to make the right choice.

they conceived of heroes with the power to act outside the system, coupled with the moral urge to protect the vulnerable and combat injustice, as an ideal to look up to: those heroes did good without fear, to remind the rest of us to to do good even when it would be easier not to.

the first superheroes were created by a generation of young refugees and Holocaust survivors to answer a question: in a world where you can't trust the law itself to uphold the law, who do you turn to?

*sigh* i'm not sure why the "Evil Superman" trope needs a peak. i'm honestly not sure why "Evil Superman" needs to be a trope. it so fundamentally misses the point of Superman (of the superhero genre in general, really)

holy shit this (the screenshotted post) is depressing. you'll have to wrest bedtime reading out of my cold dead hands. what the fuck did you have a baby for if not to spend time with them?

guess I better design my giant paper D20, I'm heading up tomorrow

Me: Son, can you play me a memory? I'm not really sure how it goes, but it's sad, and it's sweet, and I knew it complete when I wore a younger man's clothes Pianist: Oh, when was that? Me: Last week Pianist: Me: Oh! Yeah, the younger man found me and took his clothes back

I don't know which lie is more insultingly transparent: the flat denial that the thing they can all see exists, or the "it's intended to suggest thread titles"

gregor samsa awoke one morning to discover he had been transformed into a sickass beetle. fuck yeah he said scuttling all over the walls and ceiling like no dumbfuck traveling salesman could ever do. this is the best day of my life he said

I mean, I can't imagine the pollsters tell respondents when exactly the tax kicks in and what proportion of people that affects.