Have You Read The One... @jupitermelichios - Tumblr Blog

So I've just read one of the worst comics I've ever read...

The only thing in the entire 6 issue run which brought me any kind of joy is this image of Batman riding what appears to be a child's toy quad bike, so now I’m sharing it with you.

for added hilarity, it is implied, though sadly not actually shown, that they ride these things down the Vegas strip in broad daylight.

Every single character may be wildly OOC, and the plot may not make sense, but maybe it was all worth it for the mental image of Vegas tourists flocking out of the casinos to watch a disgustingly sweaty Batman and Robin ride tiny children's quad bikes

#batman & robin #tim drake #bruce wayne #It's not the worst bat comic I've ever read #but only just #also cass goes on the worst date in the history of romance #and it's unintentionally very funny #this boy says three lines total to cass #'can I have your number'#'sorry i'm so late'#and 'when i was a child i watched my father be beaten to death in front of my and it left me traumatised'#and then he buys her a drink without asking what she wants #and she leave to go do hero stuff #and as far as i know that's the last time we ever saw him #which is probably for the best if that's how he thinks a first date should go

ceescedasticity

Saw a post saying it's impossible to, uh, de-Morrisonize Talia without heavily rewriting Damian but I don't think that's true? You just make it so she didn't know about him either — or didn't know the League had him. Damian's been raised by some godawful minions with occasional involvement by Ra's. You'd need to adjust some details but there's no reason that couldn't produce the same Damian as Morrisonized Talia.

ceescedasticity

If didn't mind being extremely stupid about it you could say Damian was raised in early childhood by Talia's evil clone.

Or give Ra's another half-sister. Or someone unrelated but just really devoted to and obsessed with the al Ghuls. The possibilities are endless.

jupitermelichios

While I'm aware it may not be to everyone's taste, as it requires retconning elements of Talia’s publication history that some people really love, my personal squaring of this circle is to make Talia at least 300 years old.

The concept of childhood as we now think of it is pretty new, it doesn't really start to coalesce until the 1800s. Add in that immortals will have a very different relationship with the passage of time from other people so ten years probably seems like nothing to her, and that Talia was raised in the League herself, and it's easy to draw a Talia who genuinely and deeply loves her son, while simultaneously allowing him to undergo the training he recieved in canon. While the LoA methods are more extreme, it was normal until relatively recently to begin training boys of certain social classes for war almost from birth, and I don't think every knight training his preteen son in the best ways to stab someone was evil, or had ill intent. It simply came from a mindset that saw children as adults in training rather than a unique stage of life, and from a world in which knowing how to stab people was probably going to be vitally important at some point, both of which an immortal Talia could reasonably have.

(This does still require Talia to give Ra's access to and influence over Damian, which is inarguably kind of a fucked-up thing to do, but even the most heroic versions of Talia generally love her dad.)

We even see an echo of this idea in Damian's speech patterns - it's clear he has been spoken to like a small adult, rather than a child, all his life. Except for some reason Morrison used that to show how Damian had never been loved, instead of simply that he was a precocious kid who was treated as intelligent enough to understand adult speech from a young age.

Plus, Talia has no frame of reference for how Bruce would treat a child beyond Dick, Jason and Tim, so her keeping Damian away from him until he was a trained warrior is honestly pretty reasonable. Bruce would definitely have also fucked up raising Damian, just in different ways.

As I said, this is just my personal solution, and I'm aware that it removes some parts of canon some people love, and leaves in some parts that people may hate. I personally enjoy the more morally grey or green/purple morality versions of a Talia, while I know others prefer her more purely heroic depictions. But at a fundamental level, I don't feel like Damian's trauma is dependant on the worst 'Talia never loved anyone' excesses of the post morrison era. Loving parents accidentally fuck their kids up every day. Good and caring people can raise deeply traumatised children (just look at Damian's other parent!). I think we can preserve much of Damian's history, while allowing Talia to return her pre-Morrison morally grey status quo, in large part simply by giving her the same grace to fuck up parenting that the comics give Bruce and Dick.

I've been on a bit of an elder scrolls kick lately, and man, the jumps in complexity between the early games is so funny when you look at them side by side, from a pretty generic fantasy plot to maybe the most complex plot in all of gaming?

Like, the plot of Arena is 'a ghost tells you that the king has been kidnapped but no one knows because an evil wizard is using magic to pretend to be the king, and then the ghost guides you to a series of dungeons which each contain part of the macguffin that kills evil wizards and frees kings. You win the dungeons, reassemble the macguffin, and save the day, the end.' It's not quite 'storm the castle free the princess', but it's not far off. The world this is happening in is interesting and complex, but the actual plot is pretty simple. I think I could explain the plot of Arena to a 5 year old without much difficulty.

Then Daggerfall's plot is 'there's a complicated 4 way civil war going on among client kingdoms, and you have been sent by the emperor to retrieve a letter he sent to one of the queens, because if it's read by the wrong person, it will make the whole clusterfuck a million times worse. Once you get there, you learn that the letter contains information about how to find and activate an ancient super-weapon, and you have to decide which faction should know this and which one should get the superweapon. Also there's 2 different undead wizards here and one is plot relevant and the other one is fucking shit up for the lols, have fun figuring out which is which.' That's a whole lot more complicated, and it begins to touch on some deep esoteric themes, but you don't need to know that the numidian is actually an artificially constructed god to follow the plot. You can play the whole game assuming it's basically just mecha-godzilla, and still understand what's going on. There's a lot of nuance and complexity to the worldbuilding, but the confusing element about it is mainly that it's a non-linear mystery game, so you have to piece things together yourself, rather than the core plot being incomprehensible. The five year-old is lost, but any reasonably intelligent pre-teen could follow it.

And then Morrowind barrells in like 'do you have a degree in philosophy? you will by the end of this game!'

'so the god who created the world wasn't supposed to do this and the other gods were pissed about it so they cut out his heart and threw it away and it landed in a volcano where it constantly phases in and out of existence, and one time the dwarves built a robot to be their new god and they were going to power it using the god heart but when they touched the god heart their entire species instantly vanished and we have no idea why but that's not important what's important is that because of that event, a bunch of elves also found it and they swore to never use its power but then three of them got together and decided that touching the 'disappear your entire species' macguffin sounded like a fun time so they killed the guy who said not to use it and touched the heart and this made them living gods and one of them writes transcendental poetry riddles for fun and profit and you need to read all 36 books of these and then do some cryptography shit and this will reveal the truth about how they murdered a dude that one time. anyway there's a guy who convinced himself that the entire world is actually a dream he is dreaming and this actually sort of became true and gave him powers but to understand why you need to first grasp how achieving enlightenment works in this religion. Also you the player are the reincarnation of that murdered guy from earlier but you're maybe also an incarnation of that murdered god at the same time, but before we can unpack that we need to deal with the dream guy because he keeps using his powers to turn people into vampires for some fucking reason and it's becoming a problem. go read this book on dragon-breaks and come back when you understand the concept of non-linear time.'

I could not explain the plot of morrowind to a child. I could not explain the plot of morrowind to most adults. you cannot even begin to effectively explain the plot without first explaining huge chunks of fictional philosophy and cosmology.

And that's not a criticism, of either morrowind or arena, I think both are effective stories in very different ways. It's just hilarious to me that they went from 'kill the evil wizard because he's evil' to 'read the 36 lessons of Vivec' in less than 10 years. improving technology does not explain that. they were putting something in the water at bethesda hq back then for sure.

#the elder scrolls #tes #morrowind #tes iii #tes arena #daggerfall

onion-souls

"Why don't the people of Gotham just move?"

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.

There are super-intelligent telepathic gorilla warlords in Africa and the Greek titans are real and chained in the abyss

choppers-pink-hat

This does beg the question of why Gotham has such a horrible in-universe reputation when all its villains are relatively human compared to the cosmic bullshit that most other heroes put up with.

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.

So my theory is that while Gotham does have a lot of crime, what it does not have is space catastrophes. And so it ends up being the most dangerous city based on a bureaucratic technicality.

starberry-cupcake

all this is very true, I just wanted to point out that the worst thing about metropolis isn't the alien invasions, killer robots or meta human fights breaking buildings, it's the power hungry scheming ego maniac billionaire who gets enough of a pass from the population, despite the several journalistic exposes about him, that he's been able to run for president and win

at least gotham's billionaire is funny in the tabloids and, even if he's rather ditzy, he seems to be helpful to legit causes, against all odds

jupitermelichios

Unfortunately the property prices probably aren't even that cheap. Based on the official map, Gotham is certainly the most densely populated city in North America, if not the world. It's an economic powerhouse on par with IRL New York, but unlike New York, it largely hasn't expanded onto the mainland. It's all built on just 3 islands. They can't expand for the most part, because a huge chunk of the mainland closest is a national park (slaughter swamp).

Add in that Gotham’s equivalent to Central Park, Robinson Park, seems to be about double the size of central park, and takes up a third of the largest island, and there's no way the competition for housing isn't absolutely insane.

Rent lowering gunshots down mean much when the landlords know there are far more tenants than there will ever be houses.

Average Gotham apartment is probably roughly the size of a postage stamp

(But also speaking as a brit, the real reason people think Gotham is a shit hole is probably the weather. My experience is that USAmericans are amazing at dealing with Big Weather that would terrify a European like tornados and hurricanes, but absolutely cannot deal with small bad weather like mizzle, and Gotham definitely has UK-levels of rain and sleet)

#that is not intended as a diss against americans #its just a matter of what you're used to #but gotham has a very different climate than even its nearest neighbours #so it would definitely not be what most people are used to #even in Jersey City or New York #the real reason why Gotham and Bludhaven are connected #isnt proximity or crime rate #its the fact that theyre the only cities in Jersey were people remember to take a raincoat everywhere #even in summer

i have no idea where this trend is coming from, but if I see one more baby queer throwing a fit because someone dared to *mention* rocky horror picture show, denying it has any cultural importance and insisting it has no place in queer culture, I'm going to start biting

just saw a comment on a video about 80s comics where someone felt the need to tell the creator that them referencing a character's costume looking a bit like rocky's had ruined the entire video, and that rhps is a (genuine quote) "stain on the lgbt community"

#this is the third time in the last month or so that i've seen something of the kind #in the absence of any other explanation #i'm going to assume someone made a ragebait tiktok #that's usually were this kind of bullshit comes from these days

It's a real pity that getting deep into fantasy or sci-fi lore isn't a more socially acceptable hobby. Not because I enjoy it, although that too. But because I genuinely think it could weaken or even kill off a lot of conspiracy theories.

The thing about conspiracies is that they're fun, they turn the world into an ARG. They make you feel clever and they come with a built in community of people to debate the finer details with.

But there are so many fictional worlds that contain conspiracies just as interesting, that can provide all of that, without being a gateway into far-right antisemitic accelerationist groups.

Who cares if the earth is flat, it isn't and we can prove it. You know what we can't prove? Whether Talos is actually a God. Did Tiber Septim achieve apotheosis? Was he a Shezarine? Did he actually mantle Akatosh? Is his godhood imperial propaganda, and does that mean the Thalmor are in the right?! This is a genuine mystery and potentially massive conspiracy, with thousands of words of evidence for and against to sift through and endlessly debate.

Did the dwemmer achieve chim, or zero sum, or is that a cover up created by the dunmer to hide a genocide?

Did Leman Russ kill the lost Primarchs? If so, was he ordered to by Emps? Why?

Was Alpharius lying about being a liar that time he said he was lying?!

Not all fantasy and sci-fi offer these, you generally need big shared universes with multiple competing writers to get enough contradictory evidence to be compelling, but the good news is, we have a whole bunch of those!

Unfortunately, even as nerd franchises dominate pop culture, it's still seen as weird to care about any mystery more complex than 'did han shoot first', and so people keep turning to bigfoot when Vivec is right there

#anyway my answers are #no he mantled akatosh #the dwemmer did a secret third thing but idk what #no russ talks a lot of shit #and no alpharius have never told a lie ever in his life except that time he said he tells lies #wh40k #tes #alpha legion #elder scrolls #vivec

I occasionally find myself feeling a smug about the fact that I'm not generally inclined to the kind of parasocial relationships with celebrities that are fairly common in fandom. And in general do I think it is good to never allow yourself to forget you don't actually know these people.

But last night I found myself having a passionate debate with my partner about which English monarch we'd most like to go to the pub with, and was forcibly reminded that no actually I'm not any different than the people who talk about Jensen Ackles like he's their bestie lmao

#for the record #William IV #(he just seems like a shockingly normal pleasant man by the standards of kings)#Edward I #(i wouldnt like him much but he'd be fairly chill and i do think he'd understand the concept of getting a round in)#Mary Tudor #(people who met her consistently talked about how intelligent and interesting she was)#and Charles II but only if i could leave after and hour #he'd be exhausting for longer than that

jupitermelichios

spent a few hours today chatting to a couple of benedictine monks who've recently got back from the vatican, during which conversation the subject of tourists came up, and I'm here to tell you if you've ever seen a monk out and about and been tempted to snap a surruptitious photo, they can see you and they do know what you're doing, and there's a 50% chance they'll think it's funny, but they'd much rather you just came up and asked for a photo.

jupitermelichios

even if they think it's funny though, they'll roast you for it afterwards. he was doing little mimes of how stupid people look trying to take secret photos. just ask, or everyone in the monastery will be laughing about you behind your back. monks are surprisingly savage as it turns out.

I've just been reminded of one of the funniest parts of Marvel lore, and I feel like not enough people know about it

There is a being in Marvel called Fin Fang Foom. He's an alien from a species which look a lot like East Asian/Lung dragons, whose spaceship crashed in Ancient China, and who has been hanging out of Earth off and on ever since. He's also a shape-shifter, and spends a lot of his time on earth disguised as a human.

Okay, so Marvel are saying lung dragons are inspired by aliens, that's fun if potentially problematic world building.

No. That is not what's going on here. Lung dragons 100% provably exist, they're immortal and magical and for some reason all called things like Mr Chen and Mr Lee, which is very fun. One of them runs his own superhero team.

So what actually happened is that a race of aliens who look like Lung dragons crash landed in the place dragons live during an era when everyone knew dragons exist. And decided the best course of action was to disguise themselves as a humans. It's like if Mar-Vell had tried to pass himself off as a dog.

I fucking love comics.

#fin fang foom #this is the kind of insane world building that you only get in comics #im pretty sure the writers of iron man were trying to say dragon myths were based on aliens #but simultaneously the writers on iron fist shang chi and agents of atlas comics #were writing stories with real dragons in them #and as a result you get this glorious nonsense #marvel #marvel 616

reverse-mermaid

“He never forgot. He just put the memories away, like old silverware that you didn’t want to tarnish. And every year they came back, sharp and sparkling, and stabbed him in the heart.” ― Terry Pratchett, Night Watch

I don't often share personal stuff on here, but my brother got married today, and it was such a beautiful and meaningful day I wanted something on my tumblr to commemorate it, so I can be randomly reminded of it in the future when I'm hunting back through my blog for something.

He's been through some very tough times and dark moments in his life, but today he married the love of his life in a ceremony conducted by the person who's been his best friend since he was 4, surrounded by people who love him and his wife, and I'm just so incredibly proud of him, so here's a photo of his morris side dancing the blessing dance over the union.

I don't think I've ever cried so many happy tears (and a few sad ones, for the people who couldn't be with us) in my life

#personal #border morris is usually painted faces and sticks #but the blessing dance specifically uses cloths rather than sticks #as well as a wonderful day for family #it's been a lovely day of being connected to my culture in a way i don't often get since i moved to the city #the morris and folk music and the food #he even quoted from last years mummers play in his speech #the most marches a wedding could be really

on the one hand, i am genuinely interested to know what professional con-man adi shankar is going to fuck up about dmc in season 2, as a person who is very interested in bad movies and tv shows from a writing/structural analysis perspective (yes S1 was a bad dmc adaptation, but more importantly it was a bad show entirely independant of any relationship to dmc, and I wish I was capable of being more objective about it because some of the ways it's bad are genuinely interesting) (many of the ways it's bad are also the most predictable 'trying to be deep without being willing to actually engage with its own politics' and '14-year-old boy's concept of dark and edgy' stuff we've seen a million times, but then there's the mad shit. the fact that agni and rudra have heads is endlessly fascinating to me. why would you do that. it's the thing that makes them visually interesting. it wouldn't even be harder to animate them headless. objectively insane design decision. lucia and cavalier angelo are both here and they're both completely baffling. eva's death appears to have literally be traced from dmc5. everything about sparda is just ???)

on the other hand, i'm too invested in dmc lore to be objective about those fuck ups so there is no way it won't make me extremely angry and i'm trying to be better about not seeking out thing that will make me angry because it does nothing good for my mental health

#to be clear i am not calling him a con man because he made a show i didn't like #he is literally a con man #his entire career is built on him lying and taking credit for things he provably did not do #“creator of castlevania” guy literally only got a producer credit because he put some funding in #he was not involved in a single creative decision #same with dredd and the grey #even most of the content on his youtube channel isn't actually created by him!#but boy does he love loudly taking credit away from all the actual creatives who poured their heart and souls into these movies and shows!#and fucking them over by announcing sequels and spin-offs that don't exist and going on a million podcasts to insist they're real #leaving them to sort out the PR disaster #also he's a trump supporter #so fuck that guy sideways #the fact that he fucked up the dmc anime is so far down the list of reasons to hate this guy it barely registers #but my opinions on him as a 'creator' definitely don't help with the inability to watch the show without getting angry

people talk a lot about the pronoun problems of writing fic about a ship who use the same pronouns, and they're not wrong

but oh man not enough people are talking about the linguistic nightmare that is multiple it/its characters, or writing from the POV of a character who uses it/its for everyone in its internal monologue

the POV character is it. the people it's talking to are it. every single object in the building and the building itself is it. plants and animals are it. the fucking sun in the sky is it! that's actually very beautiful when you think about it and I think having the same pronouns as the sun is super cool but also there are not enough context clues on earth to make this not confusing to read!

i'm sure there's a knack to writing like this that I just don't have yet - I used to be someone who worried a lot about the 'ship who share pronouns' thing and now I barely think about it, and that's just the result of years of practise - but oh boy do I not have that knack yet.

#plus side of writing multiple WIPs involving it/its characters;#gets me more used to the pronouns so it feels more natural to use them irl #downsides;#WHO IS TALKING RIGHT NOW?!#it/its #(genuinely if anyone with more experience with this has tips i'd appreciate you sharing them)

mmhhch

holy water play

not safe not sane XDD

#my babies

Went to see the new Mortal Kombat movie (it's great, highly recommend if you think you'd like a mortal kombat movie. You definitely known just from the concept if it's going to be for you, it's not doing anything unexpected except actually being decently well made, but I had a blast) but this lead to me going on a deep dive into the MK wiki to see how they adapted the costume designs

and this lead me to see the official MK11 key art for Shinook for the first time, and uh

they gave the god of necromancers big naturals?!

(to be clear, that is not an edit, that is actually the officially released art for literal god shinook. and since he's not in MK1, it's also his most recent official look, so until confirmed otherwise i'm going to assume the shinook in the current timeline also has big naturals.)

#mortal kombat #gandalf big naturals #has competition #shinnok #mk11

So I happened to see a discussion between some USamericans about nationalised health-care online, in which the argument was being made that countries like the UK pay for healthcare through our taxes, so it's not actually that different.

And putting aside all the ways it is different, it made me want to figure out what the price difference actually was. I knew the NHS would be cheaper, it's not a for-profit business afterall, but I was not prepared for how big the difference actually was.

According to Forbes, the average american pays around $7000 a year (£5,162 at current conversion rates) in health insurance premiums for one person

In the UK, the figure is harder to reach, because it's a % of income, but for someone earning the national average salary of £35,000, they pay 20% income tax on all income over £12,500 a year, of which about 20% goes to the NHS.

Which works out as £900 ($1220) a year.

And the American cost is just the premiums! It doesn't include copays, out of network fees, dental care... (The UK one sort of covers dental - we still have to pay but NHS dentists are subsidised and have pricing caps imposed by the government, and can't charge you if you're recieving unemployment or some types of disability benefits. It's not great, but it's better than nothing).

Meanwhile, the only cost to me is capped dentist fees (the maximum they can charge is currently £330, which is only for stuff like dentures, bridges, crowns, or fitting braces/retainers) and a charge for prescriptions of £10 ($13.50) per medication (only for medication I take home with me, anything administered directly by a doctor or nurse is free, so my cancer medication was free, but the medications I took at home to manage the symptoms cost £10 each). And in Scotland they don't even have prescription charges!

£900 plus vs £5162. At least.

And then you get to the comparison in private health insurance costs. I actually have private insurance through my job, the same way most americans do, on top of my NHS coverage.

I pay £65 ($88) a month, and my deductible is £150 ($203) a year with no copay. And it's pretty decent insurance.

And the conservatives freak out about one health insurance CEO being murdered?!

I think Americans should be legally allowed to burn Health Insurance companies to the ground actually.

#this is not me bragging #or trying to rub it in americans faces #i was genuinely just interested because i'd never seen anyone break down the difference financially before #and maybe this will be helpful to someone who's having one those arguments I stumbled onto #i already hated conservative american politicians but holy shit #no wonder they refuse to fund your education system and make it hard to emmigrate #they know if their constituents actually understood how they'd been shafted #they'd fucking riot

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