你捧著花蕊 花蕊沒有你美

rui | en/简/繁/fr~ | they/她/ael | 18↑ | ao3 | book reviews | translation | ko-fi ♡ | 江湖一程，有缘相逢 | the ages of men are like the generations of the leaves; they fall in winter to return in spring.

[ruiconteur]

housekeeping

links

song translations

poetry translations

fansub for 莲花楼 mysterious lotus casebook: intro post, landing page (whoops this is also currently on hiatus rn)

qiao wanmian’s letter to li xiangyi // li lianhua’s letter to di feisheng

breakdown of poetic references in 山外

li lianhua’s hair ornaments

status

on indefinite hiatus

i have a rather odd hot-and-cold relationship with social media oops

@ discord ppl: pester me there i’m more likely to answer

[fleshst4r]

.

we're not going to make it

we will make it

it'll take too long to rebuild ourselves

we will make it

but what if we don't wake up in the morning

we will make it

i don't see a future with me in it

we will make it

we'll give up long before then

we will make it

im scared

i love you. we will make it

Voting ended onApr 11

[animnightmare]

The votes on this post. Oh. A poem in poll form, interactive art, the fact we can see how the other people reading it felt. im. this is really good.

[writing-prompt-s]

You are a villain famous for “killing” heroes. In reality, heroes come to you to fake their deaths.

[caffeinewitchcraft]

Sometimes they try to pay you.

You are posted out by the Hollywood sign tonight, sitting under the frame where the W used to be. It got burnt to a crisp during last week’s big superhero fight. A hero died right where you’re sitting. The whole area’s been closed down until Hero Force can coordinate a recovery effort. Usually it’d be done by now but no one’s willing to touch it until the ash has been completely blown away.

It’s a rule that the world must stand still when a hero dies.

“How much?”

The voice comes from behind you. The lights that illuminate the Hollywood sign are down to hide as much of the scorch marks as possible. You wouldn’t be able to see anything even if you did turn around, so you don’t.

You put some chapstick on, the glide of the balm against your wind chapped lips grounding.

“I said,” the Hero says, voice tightening, “How. Much.”

There’s the sound of gravel crunching now. They’re wearing heavy boots and the scent of fresh blood grows stronger the closer they get. Their breathing is smooth and even which means it’s not their blood.

You put the cap back on your chapstick and tuck it into your leather jacket’s inner pocket. “I don’t take money.”

“Then what do you take?” The Hero rounds the Y and comes into your line of sight. The dark hides most of their features, but you can make out a glittering gold mask and the dull shine of drying blood on their chest plate. Their breathing may be even, but their stance isn’t. They sway in place, back and forth, back and forth. Their arms wrap around their stomach. “I’ve got land. A house. You can have it.”

Keep reading

[dreamingnemleria]

[dragon-in-a-fez]

[stealingpotatoes]

rereading your own fics/wips is a very slippery slope into finding out you actually have to finish your fics if you want them finished

[trickstertime]

Huh? What's this?? Something is on this 5c coin???

ENHANCE

[kaoinim-deactivated20220927]

[qifreynothing]

ps5 brain monday

[what-even-is-thiss]

Oh so THIS is the ps5 post. I can see why you all imprinted on it now that’s hilarious

[r04ches]

songs and music are so fucking good. do you guys know about songs and music?????????

[zegalba]

Plastic Chair in Wood by Maarten Baas (2008)

[keynes-fetlife-mutual]

I'm obsessed with this chair. The artist takes a flimsy hunk of injection-molded plastic that's been cost-cut to hell and back, and insists that we look at it with fresh eyes and understand its beauty. And they went about it in the most labor-intensive way I can think of.

Absolutely nothing about this design is convenient to execute in wood. Every piece is curved, most have compound curves. This is artisan craftsmanship: it's inherently slow, manual, and skilled. Notice, also, that most features of this chair must be thicker and heavier than on the plastic chairs being imitated. Injection-molded chairs can be produced in this shape in a matter of minutes with far less material at very low cost.

If these flowing, organic curves are so beautiful in polished wood, perhaps they are also beautiful in the mass-produced chairs that are far more accessible. Perhaps we should remember to admire designs that succeed enough to become ubiquitous. I don't know about you, but I'll never see injection-molded chairs the same way again.

[transhuman-priestess]

@puppygirllaika

[puppygirllaika]

I agree with all of this, but YOU HAVE HIT UPON A FORGOTTEN TRUTH OF PLASTIC CHAIRS!!!!!

The standard one-piece injection molded plastic chair is referred to as a "Monobloc", literally just describing it as a single piece. The history of this chair is fascinating, and it all starts back in 1946, with the D.C. Simpson Monobloc.

Douglas Colborne Simpson was an architect mostly active in the 40's and 50's, designing a lot of classic mid-century style buildings in Vancouver, Canada(1). In 1946, as part of a government project to find new uses for materials developed for WWII, he and engineer James Donahue developed the design you see above, simply called the Monobloc(2). Unfortunately, we don't know a lot about this chair as it was only ever a prototype, and no modern examples have survived, nor have most of the records surrounding it(3). To my knowledge, we don't actually know if this was technically injection molded, or crafted some other way. We can't even be sure if it was technically the inspiration for the designs that followed, but no matter the case it has lent its name to the entire genre.

Plastics technology was simply not what it is today back in the 1940's. Most people would have had very little plastic in their homes, most likely just a few pieces of Bakelite (the first commercially viable plastic, made from a formaldehyde based resin in a Bakelizer, the best name for any industrial manufacturing equipment ever). Over the following few decades, however, as a wider variety of plastics were both developed and came down in price to the point of commercial viability, the concept of the plastic chair was revisited, and the first folks to revisit it were Helmut Batzner, in 1964, and Joe Colombo, in 1965.

This, is the Bofinger chair, Batzner's design:

The elements of D.C.Simpson's Monobloc were pretty alien compared to todays mass-manufactured plastic chairs, but here we start to see some more modern elements come into play. The first thing you probably notice is the front legs, which have that characteristic visible 90 degree bend in them for added rigidity, plus a much more comfortably leaned back and slightly scoop-shaped seat. We also see much more support in the back rest, with broad triangles allowing for a more efficient use of materials without losing back support.

Similar to Simpson, Batzner was not an industrial designer, but an architect, and this chair had a very specific purpose. Batzner and his team designed it as part of a project to build a new theater in Karlsruhe, Germany, which required a large amount of additional seating which could be easily packed away into storage or distributed around the theaters rooms by the staff (4). As such, it was designed to be both lightweight and stackable, so several of them could be moved by one person, and they could be stored compactly. This piece of furniture was a huge hit a the theater, and was so popular that 120,000 units would ultimately be manufactured and sold around the world, with each one taking just 5 minutes to produce (4).

Around the same time, Joe Colombo enters the scene with this:

Colombo was an artist in several mediums who, after taking over his families appliance company in the 50's, made the shift towards architecture and interior design, and started designing a wide array of trend-setting furniture(5). The chair shown above is known as the Universale (sometimes referred to as the Chair Universal 4867), designed in 1965. This chair differs pretty greatly from the ones that came after it, it many ways it represents a different path that could have been taken, but it's also very widely referenced as an inspiration for what is broadly considered the origin of the white plastic chair the world over.

Enter: the Fauteuil 300

This is, arguably, the first iteration of the white plastic chair we all know today. Designed by Henry Massonnet in 1972, the Fauteuil 300 and it's imitators are, collectively, the single most widely used piece of furniture in the entire world(6). Before that, however, it was something else entirely: works of art.

What might be hard to recognize in hindsight is that all of these chairs described so far were not everyday objects. They were on the forefront of modern design, they made use of brand new materials and manufacturing processes, and at the time they were each made, they were slick, stylish, and fairly expensive. Despite the speed at which they could be manufactured, these innovative, high-end chairs rose sharply in cost up through the early 1980's due to the sheer demand for them. They weren't cheap spare seating you stuck in the garage, they were placed at dining tables and on fine patios, and they were a wildly popular talking point. That's not to say their expense justified their artistic value, but rather that their expense and popularity was a product of their status as highly contemporary and boundary-pushing designs.

With the price of plastics declining after the 70's, the increasing accessibility of injection molding to manufacturers, and the widespread popularity of these designs, copycats proliferated rapidly, and eventually drove the price down. This era, in the 80's and 90's, is when these chairs became cheap an ubiquitous, and where they became manufactured the world over.

And here is where we reach this piece, "Plastic chair in wood", by Maarten Baas, and a piece of the history I've left out so far. The Monobloc was designed to be made out of wood. Like the the other chairs designed by Joe Colombo, like the chairs that predated the Simpson, the Monobloc was designed with the intention of using laminated plywood, but as the artists and designers behind them began to experiment with new materials they fell in love with the idea of making them from plastic, and so they did. They redesigned and redesigned until they made something that would be impossible to make in wood at a price most people could afford, but which could be made from plastic in mere minutes. The organic curves and thin profiles would take so much time, so much waste material, so much skill and effort to create if made of wood that they could never be furniture, they could only be art. Baas' chair is a perfect, beautiful reflection of that.

That, in brief, is the history of the design of the white plastic Monobloc chair, but it's not all there is to know. In fact, it's kind of just the start. I've linked my sources below, but I would strongly recommend checking out the German documentary Monobloc, by Hauke Wendler. It goes over the history, but it's far more interested with what the Monobloc means, and what it's place is in our world today. The impact it's made, the better and the worse, and what it says about us. It's fascinating, and well worth your time.

sources below.

(1) https://www.greggsimpson.com/DCSimpson.htm (2) https://www.greggsimpson.com/Furniture.html (3) https://www.cnn.com/style/article/history-of-plastic-chairs-karim-rashid/index.html (4) https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O372075/bofinger-chair-stacking-chair-rudolf-baresel-bofinger/ (5) https://framemark.vam.ac.uk/collections/2006AT2686/full/2200,/0/default.jpg (6) https://www.design-museum.de/en/exhibitions/detailpages/monobloc-a-chair-for-the-world.html

@keynes-fetlife-mutual tagging you because your reblog about Baas work makes me think you would appreciate this.

[butterfly-sapphic]

Always fun to learn about a tumblr friends surprise special interest

[cryoverkiltmilk]

We all hear about the hatemail and PVP, but this site is also unmatched for activating a trap card.

[vetchtibbles]

a moment of silence for my roommate who has to endure me doing linguistics homework. out loud. making sounds with parts of my mouth and throat I didn’t even realise I could use to make sounds. repeatedly and with passion

[teacupsandcyanide]

i think the moment of silence needs to come directly from you on this one

[evergreen-femme]

at some point you have to realize that you actually have to read to understand the nuance of anything. we as a society are obsessed with summarization, likely as a result of the speed demanded by capital. from headlines to social media (twitter being especially egregious with the character limit), people take in fragments of knowledge and run with them, twisting their meaning into a kaleidoscope that dilutes the message into nothing. yes, brevity is good, but sometimes the message, even when communicated with utmost brevity, requires a 300 page book. sorry.

[poisonedfate]

“why is merlin always in situations?”

this is merlin 70% of the time:

[poisonedfate]

someone stop this guy

[wizardmervin]

He’s just incapable of minding his own business

[evedaser]

physically incapable of keeping his head down and out of trouble and i can’t tell if hunith was laughing or crying when she sent him to gaius

[evedaser]

reminder that in 2x01 merlin went down to the mines to tell them to shut up (courtesy of prince prat) and when he found all the miners screaming and running for their lives (he has NO IDEA about sigan or his tomb at this point!! not even rumours!!) he immediately goes in the direction they were running from. with literally not even one clue about why a bunch of strong grown men were pissing themselves. idiot.

[cheaphalloweencostume]

real

[pluckyredhead]

The Stephanie Brown Wars

It has come to my attention that not enough people know everything DC put Stephanie Brown and her fans through in the 2000s and 2010s, so here, as threatened, is the Saga. There have definitely been female characters who have been put through more horrific storylines, but what I think is really remarkable about Steph's story is how clearly it highlights the misogyny against real women, i.e. readers, that was completely mask-off in the comics industry at the time.

Please note that I am only going to be focusing on Steph's death in War Games, her erasure from continuity with the New 52, and the fallout from both of those events. If I dug into the sexist treatment she got from Batman and Tim prior to her tenure as Robin, we'd be here all day.

ANYWAY. It begins in 2004. In Robin #125, Tim's dad discovers that he is Robin, and threatens to out Batman unless his underage son quits this highly dangerous and illegal activity (fair).

In Robin #126, Steph sees Tim being kissed by his ex-girlfriend, Darla Aquista. Now in Tim's defense, Darla initiated the kiss and Tim tells her afterwards that he's seeing someone. On the other hand, the kiss lasts for four whole panels and five lines of dialogue from observers. Also, considering Tim originally ended his relationship with Darla by cheating on her with Steph, you can see why Steph might not be feeling super trusting here. [EDIT: Darla was not Tim's ex, I was thinking about Ariana Dzerchenko there. Tim being chronically unfaithful still holds but that's for another post.]

Upset, Steph makes herself a costume, breaks into the Batcave, and declares herself the new Robin:

Bruce is like "...You know what, yeah, okay." Alfred pulls him aside and immediately calls out what's going on here:

Bruce very pointedly does not answer Alfred's question, which is as good as a yes. And look: you can question Steph's decision to volunteer as Robin out of spite because she assumed her boyfriend was cheating on her without talking to him. And you can question her later actions that kick off War Games. But she's sixteen years old. Meanwhile Bruce, a grown-ass man who is also Batman, is playing mind games with a couple of high schoolers in order to...what? Destroy Tim's relationship with his only living parent and totally discard Steph when she's no longer useful, presumably.

Also please note Bruce accurately describing Steph's best qualities, which are also her fatal flaw. And remember that the quality he claims he's hiring for is also what he'll blame her firing on.

Time goes by. Bruce trains Steph, but he tells her she's on "probation" and that means 1) she doesn't learn any of the big secrets and 2) if she disobeys any order, no matter how small, she's fired, no second chances. For the record, none of the boys were ever on probation (Jason and Tim had long training periods but that's the opposite; they were protected until they were ready, not thrown into the field without full support), they all knew Bruce's identity, and they disobeyed his orders all the time. Tim did it on his very first mission.

Just...putting this here.

In Robin #128, Batman is fighting a villain while Steph waits in the Batplane. Fearing for Bruce's life, Steph disobeys his orders to stay in the plane and tries to rescue him, only to be taken hostage by the villain, who escapes. Bruce fires her, and tells her she's not allowed to be Spoiler anymore, either. In a particularly cruel move, he specifies that all the codes will be changed in the Batcave to keep her out, even though in the previous issue, Tim noted to Steph that Bruce didn't change anything to keep him out.

Just to make the point again: yes, Steph broke the rules. However, none of the boys before her, nor Damian after her, were ever penalized the way she was and for such a minor infraction. Disobeying orders and getting taken hostage are like the second and third most important Robin responsibilities, after puns.

Steph is devastated, and this is what leads to War Games, which was a crossover event across the entire Batman line that ran from October 2004 to January 2005. It began with Batman: The 12 Cent Adventure, in which a bunch of crime bosses all show up for a meeting that none of them called, get antsy, and start shooting. The ensuing deaths cause a gang war across Gotham. Eventually Steph confesses to Catwoman that she called the meeting. She was trying to play out a war game she'd found on the Batcomputer to show Batman he was wrong to fire her, but the meet went wrong. A guy named Matches Malone was to show up and become the new crime boss of Gotham, but he never turned up.

Of course, the reader and Selina know what Steph doesn't: Matches Malone is Batman. If Batman doesn't know about this meeting, he can't control the situation. But if Batman had treated Steph like a true Robin instead of putting her on "probation," Steph would have known he was Matches Malone, and none of this would have happened.

I'll say it a third time: Steph fucked up, yes. But Steph was sixteen. What was Bruce's excuse?

Anyway. While running around Gotham desperately trying to fix her mistake, Steph encounters Black Mask, who manages to knock her out. He then chains her up and tortures her with a power drill in order to get her to spill Batman's plans (which she does not do). Here's how this sixteen-year-old is drawn when she's being tortured (in Robin #131):

Thank god we can see her tits and her ass at the same time, that was really important to the narrative.

Here's how she's drawn the next time we see her, in Catwoman #35:

Gotta make this dying teenager look hot or what's the point, amirite?

Steph manages to fight her way free, but Black Mask gets the upper hand again after she refuses to kill him. He shoots her, then lets her go to send Batman a message. She makes it to Bruce, who takes her to Leslie Thompkins's clinic, where she dies:

THESE PANELS ARE IMPORTANT. (Batman #633.)

Side note: Bruce is with Tim when Leslie calls him to tell him Steph is actively dying, and consciously decides not to tell Tim and let him and Steph say goodbye.

Side note #2: Steph's death was always planned as part of War Games. Dylan Horrocks, who was writing Batgirl at the time, and Devin Grayson, who was writing Nightwing, both vocally opposed this but were overruled, which is why this aspect of the plot barely plays out in their books.

Anyway. What I want to talk about is the aftermath of Steph's death. Characters dying was commonplace back then (way more common than it is now, actually), and female characters was extremely commonplace - this was a time when the term "fridging" was becoming more commonplace but wasn't yet seen as something to avoid. But readers noted a couple of things about Steph's death in particular:

The art was really inappropriately sexual. Why was Steph's tortured body being drawn to titillate?

Steph didn't have a memorial case in the Batcave. Why was that? Jason Todd, the only other dead Robin, had a case. In fact, Jason retained his case even after he came back to life (his first appearance as Red Hood is in Batman #635, two months after Steph's death). Why didn't Steph get a case?

I used the word "readers" specifically up there because it wasn't just Steph fans. I remember hearing from a number of people at the time who were like "Yeah I didn't actually like Steph, I thought she was annoying. But what happened to her was fucked up."

And these readers started asking DC where Steph's case was. Social media wasn't really a thing yet, but they asked in fan letters, at conventions, on LiveJournal and blogs, on forums.

"She wasn't really Robin," DC said, over and over again (like when Dan DiDio said it at Wizard World LA in 2007).

"But Batman said she was Robin. Right there on the page."

"Well, she wasn't."

"Why not? What makes her different from the other Robins? What makes her different from Jason?"

"...no comment."

(Hint: IT WAS THE GIRL COOTIES.)

At another con, Bill Willingham, who was writing at the time, said he wanted to "take a gun to all those girls who kept asking about a memorial case for Spoiler." I'm paraphrasing because the source is some LiveJournal page buried deep in the bowels of the internet, but I'm confident in the "take a gun to those girls"* part of the phrase because it burned itself onto my brain at the time.

*It was of course not only girls and women, not that he cared.

To be very clear: this man thought it was appropriate to respond to a group of mostly female readers pushing back against the comic book industry's relentless depictions of violence against women by...describing his fantasies of enacting violence against women. Out loud. With his mouth. To an audience. While acting in a professional capacity.

I also want to note something that never occurred to me at the time, but we (yes, I was there, Gandalf; this is in fact my origin story) weren't even asking for them to bring Steph back. Like, the thought never crossed my mind. Compare to HEAT (Hal's Emerald Attack Team), a group of fans who waged a harassment campaign after Emerald Twilight demanding Hal's reinstatement to the Corps and the firing of the writer who wrote the comic. We were only asking for DC to acknowledge that Steph had been Robin, and it infuriated them.

As a last point on Steph's death: I mentioned this in another post, but when Steph died in 2004, she had zero official action figures despite having been a recurring character in comics for 12 years. She wouldn't get her first action figure until 2010. But in 2005, DC started selling this:

Yes, he is holding the power drill.

Anyway. Fans kept the pressure up for four years, and eventually DC got so fed up that they just...fucking brought Steph back. I don't know how much of the reason was so that they wouldn't have to give her a memorial case and thus "let the girls win," but I bet it was more than 50%.

This is so fucking funny to me. What a bitchy little line to give Bruce. (Robin #174.)

See, immediately after Steph's death, Leslie Thompkins told Bruce she could have saved Steph but deliberately let her die to teach Bruce a lesson about letting kids fight in his war, which was a shocking bit of character assassination for Leslie and also...lol. As if Bruce cares about Steph enough to change his behavior.

Now in 2008 the official retcon was that while Steph was out of it and barely clinging to life, Leslie snuck her out of the country to Africa (where in Africa? don't worry about it, it's all the same, right?) to recover, and just told Bruce she was dead for the same ineffective lesson-teaching from before.

So Steph was never really dead! And Bruce knew that despite being by her side when she flatlined! And then he lied to Tim and said she was dead for...enrichment? Tim needs a little unnecessary grief in his enclosure sometimes. (Lol j/k Tim was nothing but grief and several nervous breakdowns in a trenchcoat at the time.) And Tim's just...basically fine with it???

DC sort of didn't really know what to do with Steph for a couple of years, so they put her through some really bad writing, and then since they had conveniently also put Cassandra Cain through several years of really bad writing, they had Cass quit being Batgirl and vanish out of comics for a bit, and Steph took over. What was done to Cass could be a post in its own right and the way she vacated the Batgirl role is awful, but it did give us the beautiful, golden, shining joy that is Batgirl (2009):

STEPHBATS YOU WILL ALWAYS HAVE MY WHOLE HEART.

This comic was beloved. It wasn't a huge seller (though comfortably above the usual cancellation threshold), but everyone I know who has read it loved it, even people who had never liked Steph before. This is the book that changed her from "cautionary tale about comic book sexism" to "fan favorite funny Batgirl."

And then the New 52 happened. And the second battle of the Steph Wars began.

If you weren't reading comics in 2011, you may not know that aside from all the controversy any major reboot engenders, the New 52 was very specifically controversial because of how women were treated by the reboot. Prior to the reboot, 12% of the creators working on DC's comics were women, which is just...an incredibly embarrassing number to begin with.

After the reboot, 1% of their creators were women. There were two (2) women in the initial New 52 lineup: Gail Simone and Amy Reeder. They were both fired the following year.

I am really struggling to communicate how badly women were treated around the New 52: creators, fans, characters. It was so bad that the Wikipedia page for the New 52 has multiple subsections about it. But I want to call out one part in particular:

This led to a tense interaction between fans and DC Comics co-publisher Dan DiDio at the 2011 San Diego Comic Con, where DiDio was asked by a fan about the drop in female creators from 12% to 1%. DiDio responded by saying, "What do those numbers mean to you? What do they mean to you? Who should we be hiring? Tell me right now. Who should we be hiring right now? Tell me."

What Wikipedia doesn't mention, but was widely reported all over the internet in 2011, was that the fan who held DC's feet to the fire at multiple panels over their obvious misogyny was dressed as Stephanie Brown.

Just like she had in 2004/2005, Steph became a symbol of the comic book industry's mistreatment of women - and a symbol that "all those girls" Bill Willingham had fantasized about shooting would not go away.

But what about Steph herself? Well, the New 52 reboot was meant to be starting over from scratch. Batman had only been around for five years, so obviously he couldn't have gone through five Robins in all that time!

...No, he'd gone through four. Dick, Jason, Tim, and Damian were all still around. But Cass and Steph were gone and Babs was still Batgirl, erasing both her status as DC's most iconic disabled character and her legacy as the first of and mentor to all the other Batgirls. Legacy only matters when it's boys, you see. And following the rules only matters when it's for the purposes of keeping girls out.

And the erasure of Steph in particular was very clearly targeted. In 2012, Bryan Q. Miller (who had written Steph's Batgirl series) tried to include Steph as a future Nightwing in his Smallville Season 11 comic, set in the Smallville universe and not the main DCU. He was told to replace her. Not with anyone in particular, just get her out of there.

Later that year, DC launched the adorable digital first Li'l Gotham series by Dustin Nguyen (who had also worked on Steph's Batgirl series) and Derek Fridolfs. The Halloween issue included a little blonde girl trick or treating while wearing what was clearly Steph's Batgirl costume, a cute little Easter egg for fans. That is, until later editions, when the girl's hair was recolored to black. Again, this is a comic that was not set in the main DC universe, and the little girl wasn't even Steph, just a random kid. (Dustin managed to sneak a reference into a later issue in 2013, and by 2014 things had chilled out enough that Steph got a proper cameo.)

Scott Snyder asked to use Steph and Cass and was told no. Same with Gail Simone. Word on the street was that DC had declared them both "toxic."

Was it DiDio who hated Steph? I have no idea. But it was certainly DiDio who publicly berated a cosplayer in a Steph costume when she asked why there were so few women in the reboot that would become his ultimate legacy. (Well, his other ultimate legacy besides shielding and repeatedly promoting noted sexual harasser Eddie Berganza for 15 years.)

Steph finally, finally returned in 2014, not just to Li'l Gotham but to the main DCU with Batman #28. It makes me very happy that Dustin Nguyen got to be the one to draw her:

(Cass would have to wait nearly two more years, until Batman & Robin Eternal in late 2015 - further proof, as if any was needed, that however bad white women have it, women of color get treated even worse.)

As the comic above would indicate, Steph was reintroduced as being Spoiler and only Spoiler - still no girl Robins allowed. The 2016 Rebirth reboot introduced the idea that she had been both Robin and Batgirl...but in a different timeline. Finally, 2021's Infinite Frontier (after DiDio's departure from DC) restored both Steph and Cass's full history with all of their previous roles to continuity, further reinforced in 2022 by both the Robins miniseries and the Batgirls ongoing, both of which co-starred Steph.

Is the comic book industry still sexist? Yes, obviously. Do I wish DC had a better idea for what to do with Steph these days than occasionally pop up in the background of a Bat comic to make a joke? Yes, obviously. But when I look back at how openly misogynistic the industry was in the 2000s and early 2010s, how naked the vitriol against female characters and readers was, I'm always shocked anew by how much has changed, and how much we used to put up with.

We've come a long way, and some of that is thanks to Stephanie Brown becoming a symbol for women who would not lay down and die, would not be erased, would not shut the fuck up. As Bruce himself put it waaaay up at the top of this post:

"I did everything I could to make her quit. She wouldn't. She stood up to me, right down the line--defied me."

So in honor of Steph, the get-back-up-again-est girl in comics, please take two things away from this post:

Remember what they did.

Never, ever shut up.

[fuckyeahchinesefashion]

Cnetizens: There’s really a world of difference between a pipa master and a younger classically trained pipa content creator. (cr 杨惟)

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The Enshittificator

Digital products and services keep getting worse. In the new report Breaking Free: Pathways to a fair technological future, the Norwegian Consumer Council has delved into enshittification and how to resist it. The report shows how this phenomenon affects both consumers and society at large, but that it is possible to turn the tide. Read more on forbrukerradet.no/breakingfree

[sindar-princeling]

aragorn's terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week:

the fellowship breaks on his watch

forced to choose who to follow

runs over 200 kilometers in under four days

thinks merry and pippin are dead

meets the reborn gandalf (a rare win), immediately has to do a 180 and ride to edoras

immediately after that needs to ride to battle

takes part in a battle which takes place over the whole night

gets maybe 20 hours of sleep over the course of the whole week

and, I cannot stress this enough, this is all still very far from over

[astriiformes]

I've reblogged this already, but need to add a very important detail to this post.

In the middle of this whole mess. March 1st, aka he day that he meets Gandalf again and has to do an immediate 180.

That's Aragorn's birthday.