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Superman: Red & Blue #5 - “Generations” (2021)

by Daniel Warren Johnson

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Technically true.

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Has anyone figured out what’s so viscerally wrong with this woman yet

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CITATION NEEDED?!!!

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"Do you ever dream of land?" The whale asks the tuna.

"No." Says the tuna, "Do you?"

"I have never seen it." Says the whale, "but deep in my body, I remember it."

"Why do you care," says the tuna, "if you will never see it."

"There are bones in my body built to walk through the forests and the mountains." Says the whale.

"They will disappear." Says the tuna, "one day, your body will forget the forests and the mountains."

"Maybe I don't want to forget," Says the whale, "The forests were once my home."

"I have seen the forests." Whispers the salmon, almost to itself.

"Tell me what you have seen," says the whale.

"The forests spawned me." Says the salmon. "They sent me to the ocean to grow. When I am fat with the bounty of the ocean, I will bring it home."

"Why would the forests seek the bounty of the oceans?" Asks the whale. "They have bounty of their own."

"You forget," says the salmon, "That the oceans were once their home."

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Since it's watermelon season!

My grandfather used to grow watermelons, among other things, and he told me about most of this, especially the orange spot. Those are the absolute best!

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After years of living in the adulting world, I think I’ve come to a realization: Manners exist to guide you to good conduct even when you’re in a bad mood.

When you’re happy, when you’re feeling generous, when you’re pleased with your gift or your service or your outcome, it’s easy to be nice. It’s easy to tip the waiter well when you’ve had a good day. It’s easy to thank the teller or the clerk when you got what you wanted out of the transaction. It’s easy to smile and chit-chat with strangers on the road when you’re in a good mood.

It’s hard to tip the waiter when you didn’t enjoy your food. It’s hard to thank the clerk for their time when you’ve just been told there’s a problem with their account and they weren’t able to fix it for you. It’s hard to think of something nice to say when your aunt gave you a crappy sweater you neither need nor want. It’s hard to be nice to people when you’ve had a shitty day. It’s HARD.

That’s what manners are for. Scripts and phrases that you learn by rote to say when you can’t think of a single nice or good thing to say from your own volition. Yes, they’re scripted. Yes, the sentiment is empty. But the scripts work in every situation, and the emptiness provides a buffer between your own unhappiness and the rest of society.

Because most of the time, it’s not the waiter’s fault that the food you ordered wasn’t what you expected. It’s not the clerk’s fault that your account is overdrawn. It’s not the fault of the barista or the stranger on the subway that you got fired today or your favorite aunt died. But even when you can’t summon a smile or a cheery word, you can still have manners, because they will serve you the same in sunshine or rain.

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Some closeups of the best graffiti I've ever seen

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Devastating to have more evidence that done IS better than perfect

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saw a tiktok of a mother taking her very tiny daughter to an art museum and she’s just walking around going “whoooa” “woooaah” to everything but then they got to a marble statue of a nude woman lying on her back and the girl points and goes “mommy🫵” and i just immediately welled up with tears and all the comments are just laughing about it and of course it’s funny but how are you not insanely moved by the way art connects everyone on earth from a centuries-old sculptor to a toddler in 2023

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Happy International Women’s Day!

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Old warriors did not get old by accident; they got old by being wise, having the right knowledge, and being tough. Never underestimate an old man who has grown up in a rough profession or a rough environment. -Bodhi Sanders

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An explainer for why I don't fuck with algorithmic social media

If you give a pigeon a little button to peck that releases pigeon food, it will push the button when it's hungry.

If you give a pigeon a button to peck that releases food every 5 pecks, it will peck it more often.

If you give a pigeon a button to peck that releases food at a randomly selected, always shifting number of pecks, the pigeon will peck that fucking button all day long.

Algorithm based social media is not set up to give you the best most fun stuff all the time, it is set up to give you a bunch of stress and nothingness with a randomized reward of something that actually makes you happy, because they want you pecking that button all damn day. It is a slot machine of content, meant to keep you putting in quarters made of your time and attention till you've nothing yet.

At least if I'm having a shit day on my own Tumblr feed it's because I've made a bad choice about who to follow and I can fix it.

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the pistachio food trend is soooo interesting because it's like. i've been following the californian pistachio water politics for years, as a californian with personal connections to agricultural workers but! basically there's been a big push in california agriculture over the last decade to pressure farmers to produce pistachios, because iran has dominated the global market in pistachios for decades, and the US government has been trying to weaken iran economically, so they want to make california pistachios a competitor. which is ridiculous, because california's agricultural infrastructure is suffering under a drought, and pistachios take insane amounts of water. so a ton of water is being redirected from the people in order to engage in a trade war with iran over fucking. pistachios.

anyway now that the US (i.e. california) is producing more pistachios than iran, the next step is to drive consumption of pistachios, so that the farmers who are producing these pistachios can continue to make money on them. ergo all the fancy pistachio coffees at starbucks and similar shit like suddenly being able to find pistachio butter in grocery stores when five years ago it was exclusively available at specialty stores and online, and the huge boom in pistachios foods in instagram and tiktok recipe content. like i watch a lot of instagram foodie reels (cooking/baking is one of my hobbies) and these get thrown onto everyone's feeds, to promote the purchasing of pistachios, so that the US can stick it to iran. it's. kind of incredible to watch this happen in real time, because it sounds like deranged conspiracy thought, but like. i've been watching this trend for the past decade and it's fucking real.

anyway one of the vegan recipe accounts i follow just posted like five pistachio-based recipes in a row and it makes me feel some kind of fucking way

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Sterek Modern Odyssey fic where sterek get together and have Eli however it is they manage whether via magic, mpreg, surrogacy, whatever, and then Stiles' paternity leave ends when Eli is a year or so old and he's immediately got assigned an undercover case. "I know it's inconvenient," his surprisingly understanding supervisor tells him, "but six months and you'll be done, and can choose to be reassigned temporarily or move to the research side of things" he's told. But it's not 6 months undercover. It's 10 years, with bigger cogs and moving parts than expected, not just with supernatural creature trafficking but also hunting, torture, "research", it's a mess, and with no communication with Derek other than the mate bond they have which allows for feeling transference, only able to reassure Derek he's okay and not dead, able to feel every proud moment that Derek has of Eli even though it's always tinged with sadness-not-quite-grief that Stiles knows is due to his absence, unable to even know who their son looks more like.

When finally, it's over.

Except it isn't entirely because then he gets kidnapped by a radical supernatural group who want to use him as an example of what will happen to humans when they're "in power" and they don't torture him but they don't exactly ensure he can stay healthy, only letting him keep up hygiene by virtue of some of their sensitive noses not wanting to deal with that side of a prisoner

Most of the group is lost to a pack of sirens who didn't care for domination over humans as long as they had their lagoon and a steady supply of victims, but Stiles escaped by being left far enough away that he wasn't initially noticed and knew he couldn't be won over by sirens, he knew his hearts desire was to go home and it would never be replicated here.

Has to figure out where the fuck he is now.

(Australia? How were they going to take over the human political system from Australia?!)

So now he manages to get to the embassy in Aus and get things started there, as far as getting a flight to Europe which would take him straight to California, once his identity has been checked and confirmed over a week or two there.

Plane goes down, now he's trapped with half the people initially on the plane while the rest are dead, in a country he doesn't know, and people need to stop wandering off. Turns out it was a group if harpies, one of their sisters flew too close and got caught in the engine, so several of this mismatch group get kidnapped, leading Stiles to have to rescue them with strict instructions for the rest of them. Has to kill multiple of them when negotiation doesn't work

(Doesn't tell them his name and where he lives, unlike some)

Now that the group is back together, and have no clue where they are country wise or direction wise, combined with waiting several days for any sign of search and rescue which doesn’t appear, so they decide as a group where to go and start walking, going into the wreckage of the plane which mostly crashed and didn't explode or have extensive fire damage when landing and stripping it for all they could with regards to food and water, emergency blankets and first aid etc, with thankfully decent enough weather that other than having to become uncomfortably close in such a short period due to sharing heat on a night, there is nobody getting sick from extreme weather conditions aside from a few sniffles for a couple of days after it rained

They manage to find themselves a rural town, who only one person of their group speaks a broken amount of Kazakh but combined with that, some broken English from their kind hosts, and a pathetic game of charades, arranges for them to be taken to the closest place with the transport to get them to the embassy

Now Stiles is going through this process again and waiting until last, where most of the people have returned to Australia to finally have time to grieve the loved one they lost in the crash, but some are on flights to various places in Europe

Stiles is alone in flying to America

He hasn't really let it process yet that since he got kidnapped by that first group after his undercover work, he has been gone another almost 2 years. He doesn't even know how so much time was lost

One of the harpies comes looking for him, managing to find him while in the crowded airport and slice his sides open with her claws, causing him to be bleeding out in a foreign airport

Luckily he gets to the hospital in time, unluckily he falls into a coma for another year and a half

Nobody in the hospital knew who he was and he couldn't talk so nobody has been contacted and when he does wake up it takes time enough for him to come around and be able to tell them his info. Again.

The FBI sends his old supervisor out specifically to collect him. He got lost 3 fucking times on what was only supposed to be a six month mission

"I think I want to work in research from now on," Stiles tells him, still kinda groggy from his morning pain meds.

"I think it's best you take a sabbatical for a while and decide if you even wanna come back, or want to spend all your time with your boy and husband from here on out."

It takes 2 weeks of pushing himself enough to make quick progress but not enough to injure himself for Stiles to be allowed to leave, with instructions regarding his need for supervision and crutches/a cane

Anyway, it's been 14 years, and he can finally come home to Derek and Eli.

Eli, all this time, has been aware of Stiles as his other parent and why he's not around, and Derek never wants to admit that there's a chance he's dead, even when he didn't feel anything for the time of his coma. Stiles has always been a presence in his life, that is his tata even if he's never really met him. His dad says it's like he never left with how similar they are clumsiness-wise, how Eli's sass will only get worse when he learns directly from Stiles. How he took photos and videos of every moment no matter how insignificant it seemed so that Derek has a comprehensive timeline he can show Stiles when he gets back. His dad never gave up hope, so he never did either, even when it seemed pointless or the other kids mocked or pitied him.

Derek can feel the bond awaken more the closer Stiles gets on the plane. The FBI hasnt contacted him this time because Stiles didn't want to get his hopes up in case anything happened again. But Derek can feel it and becomes jumpy and nervous the more hours pass, as Stiles gets closer to US soil, before he can feel excitement that's not his own bubbling in his chest and relief, overwhelming relief once Stiles, unknown to him still, lands on the runway, once he's safely out of the plane, and it's almost too much to contain in his body, far too restless, desperate to run so leaves Eli a note for when he gets home from school, and goes into the preserve

Eli returns home and thinks nothing of it, and then there's a knock at the door, and he opens it of course. Stiles promptly bursts into tears, "Eli?" And Eli knows deep in his soul that this is his other dad, even if he didn't recognise him from all the pictures around the house, didn't know all the stories back to front, he can feel it down to his very bones that this man was supposed to have been here to raise him

Derek returns from his run to the open door and Eli quietly crying into Stiles' arms while Stiles himself sobs while still trying to comfort Eli. "Stiles?" He can't quite believe his eyes, locked with Stiles' own, but suddenly all his feelings the past few days make sense.

"I'm home," he whispers