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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Can confirm, I’m right on the edge of Gen-X and Millennials. I was the only one of my friends who had a computer pretty much all the way through elementary school. And the only reason we had computers in our house was because my dad was a computer engineer. By the time I was in highschool pretty much everyone had at least a family computer.




  • It’s a really great book that I recommend to even the most casual Superman fan and especially people who think Superman is just an overpowered boy scout. It explores how Superman has evolved over the decades through the influence of different writers and artists and how their personal experiences and cultural shifts helped to evolve the character. He also examines the character’s transformation across other media, including radio, television, and film. Like how the now cheesy sounding, “It’s a Bird… It’s a Plane… It’s Superman” originated from the radio broadcasts that had to adapt a comic to a non-visual medium. Or why they didn’t just write a Superman comic in the 40’s where he goes and defeats Hitler, because they didn’t want to take away from the GIs or give kids false hope that Superman could just swoop in and save the day in a real life situation. But they also didn’t want kids to think Superman would ignore what was going on, so that’s when they started introducing a lot of off-world stories.



  • Per Glen Weldon in his book Superman: The Unauthorized Biography, kryptonite representing the destructive force of nostalgia and survivor’s guilt, reminding us that clinging to the past can undermine the present.

    Siegel and Shuster had created the Man of Steel as the ultimate immigrant, the personification of the promise America represented to them. His abilities are metaphors for limitless potential and opportunity, for new horizons stretching out before us: the American Way.
    It seems fitting, then, that the only thing capable of harming him would be a reminder of the Old World he left behind, a past that is irrevocably gone. Only the past—our past—can hurt us.
    To this day, kryptonite functions in the Superman mythos as the physical manifestation of both survivor’s guilt and a particularly toxic kind of nostalgia, a reminder that when we dwell on what we’ve lost, we can kill what we have.






  • I love the joke, and I also love her.

    She is the sweetest person I’ve met at a convention. I was pretty starstruck meeting her, so of course my brain just turned off, and she was so kind and told me a couple of stories. When my brain finally rebooted, I asked her to sign the picture for my wife, and she came around the table to give me a hug telling me how sweet that was. She could have just signed a picture and sent me on my way. But her taking that extra 30 seconds or so gave me an experience I’ll never forget.



  • I look him up and down. I’ve seen it a thousand times. He is all bravado and boot jingles. Dressed like he stepped straight out of a Western Warehouse. I could tell those shiny boots had never stepped foot on a ranch. Just puffed-up pride wrapped in a cowboy hat, trying to mask the desperation of someone who’s never been anywhere else. And doesn’t realize he is the one getting fucked by the system.

    “You’ll be seeing me soon, huh?” I say, watching his eyes flicker. “Let me tell you something, partner. If you don’t straighten out that attitude of yours—if you don’t drop this little act and do your job like a professional—I’ll find someone else to sell this house.” I let the words sink in before delivering the knife twist. “Maybe a dame.”

    His mouth opens, then shuts.

    “Oh yeah,” I continue, my voice smooth as the whiskey he probably pretends to drink neat. “I’ll bring in one of those ‘progressive libs’ you despise so much. Maybe someone fresh out of California, with a Prius and pronouns in her email signature. Someone who’ll take your commission, your sale, and leave you standing in the dust.”

    His face twitches. The bravado cracks. He swallows hard. His grip loosens on my hand.

    “Good talk,” I say, finally letting go of his hand. “Now get to work.”


  • My wife and I sat across from each other, eyes heavy with the kind of exhaustion you don’t shake with a good night’s sleep. The school had made its choice—they put our boy in harm’s way, ignored the words on paper that were supposed to protect him. An IEP, they called it. Just another stack of bureaucracy to them. To us, it was supposed to be a shield. But shields don’t work when the people holding them don’t give a damn.

    So we made our choice too. He wasn’t going back. Not to that school. Not to a system that saw him as a problem instead of a person. We are taking matters into our own hands—homeschooling.

    And Texas? We were done. Finished. Washing our hands of it. This place chews people up and spits them out, and we aren’t waiting around to be next. Somewhere out there, there had to be a place where education means more than lip service, where kids aren’t just numbers on a budget sheet.

    Tomorrow, we meet the realtor. Sell the house. Cut the ties. A clean break. A new start. Maybe, just maybe, we’ll find a place where they gave a damn.