massivelyfuzzybarbarian

[massivelyfuzzybarbarian]

I don't understand answer 4. Like, I don't believe in angels, but if you ask me if seraphim are a form of angel, the answer is yes. Belief doesn't come into it. Is this just my autism?

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Perpetual worry that it was a trick or a mistake and I actually do need my backpack, but I still can't just bring my backpack because everyone will make fun of me if I'm the only one with a backpack? Or, I guess, that was different if you had a happy childhood.

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happy sex email day everybody!

[massivelyfuzzybarbarian]

16-page zine about a long-term interest of mine, atmospheric diving suits. I love these underwater "robots" and their strange & varied histories

Update: You can buy a physical copy of this zine from my shop, if you’d like!

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[massivelyfuzzybarbarian]

I think an underappreciated element of Leia's character is that even after days or weeks of ruthless interrogation interspersed with torture, she still had the presence of mind to identify a feature of the Stormtrooper who barged into her cell that she could mock.

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Superman desperately scanning the street during a fight to find the most morally acceptable car to throw at his opponent, knowing that not everybody has insurance, and loss of transportation can ruin a life -

A wave of incredible relief washes over him as he spots the hard geometric lines and silver paintless sheen of a Cybertruck.

[massivelyfuzzybarbarian]

Image Description.

Facebook post from Matt Norris.

Post reads like a conversation between 2 people:

Prison labor is a problem we need to address soon.

Convicts in prison should have to work like the rest of us.

You mean like slavery?

No, we’re giving them 3 meals and a bed, at our expense, while they just sit around and watch TV. They should have to work!

Right. Like slavery.

It’s not like slavery!

Can they leave?

No.

Can they refuse work?

No.

So how exactly isn’t this slavery?

We DO pay them!

Do we pay in accordance with labor laws?

No. We pay them between 33 cents and $1.41/hour with a maximum daily wage below $5, then take up to half of that as room&board fees and victim compensation.

Right. So like slavery.

BUT.

No.

Image then links to this url.

Below URL image reads “fun bonus fact: enough of our labor market currently relies on labor at these depressed rates, that it has a substantial downward pressure on both wages and job availability in low-skilled sectors. Immigrants aren’t taking your jobs. Slavery is.

End description.

I’d also like to add it’s not just private prisons. It’s also private detention centers where ICE keeps the immigrants.

-fae

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[massivelyfuzzybarbarian]

i LOVED your spideytorch post, and youve opened my eyes, Johnny Storm is asexual you are so right. what are your thoughts on parksborn?

Wah, thank you. God, maybe if I just keep alluding to it I can sway people without ever actually compiling my case....

Parksborn's here! But you're the third person to request it, so whatever, I'll elaborate. Let's talk about parksborn. This is gonna be entirely stream of consciousness.

So it's Spider-Man, and Peter Parker is the main character and ergo the center of the universe. Everybody else feels like a complete person with their own offscreen story, but they're in this story to orbit him and make him shine brighter and sharper and get lit up in return. Almost everybody is a warped mirror of him. Flash, JJJ, Harry, MJ, and to an extent May are some of his strongest foils because they're aware of this on a meta level and have intense love-hate relationships with it. And Harry is the least equipped to deal with it. Like, structurally.

The way Harry is crafted is that there's a pool with one copy of each character trait in it, and him and Peter have to split them up. So Peter has looks and brains and charisma and a loving home life, and Harry has money and an alive parent who resents him for lacking all those other things and wants to join a son-swapping program. Peter is an innately kind of lousy person with a lot of agency he focuses on trying extremely hard to do good, and Harry is a decent, reliable guy who gets systematically broken down by forces outside of his control until he feels cornered into supervillainy. Sometimes there's the impression that he has a choice in the matter, but when you consider tragedy as a genre and how it navigates people into bad outcomes using their own neutral traits, he really doesn't. He actually makes the choice, repeatedly, to do the best he can, and he always fails. There was only one "usually wins the day" in the bag of traits even though these characters want to be on the same side winning the same day.

Being Harry Osborn is an inescapable hell because Peter Parker exists - out of universe because that's how he's constructed, and in-universe because Harry can't escape the repercussions of his father's feud with Peter and the choices the two of them have made because of it, the way that Norman initiating conflict ropes Peter into perpetuating it. It would be incorrigible for Peter not to oppose Norman, but him doing so doesn't net Harry anything except to turn a pervasive, quiet unhappiness into an explosive one. The game is rigged so that Peter can never balance this harm out. Neither of them can. Nothing can.

This conflict makes Harry's life unbearable. It kills Harry's best friend and his dad and then it takes him down too before he's 30, and he sees it coming the entire time.

So anyway the triumph here is that Harry, with fierce deliberation, loves Peter anyway.

And nobody asked but in the linked response I was mostly thinking about this poem:

[massivelyfuzzybarbarian]

I came up with this three-way table to help me (and now you, if you want) to rate things out of 5 stars. I was thinking of books and films when I made it, but you can probably use it for other stuff.

The idea is that you rate the thing on how much stuff you loved and how much stuff you hated, and those things weight against each other. There's only one way to get 5 stars or 1 star, so those should end up as the rarest ratings, wtih 3 stars being the most common.

'Spicy' means that the thing inspires emotion, whether positive or negative, while 'bland' means it doesn't affect you much either way.

An example of a 3-star (spicy) - for me personally - would be the Twilight series, because there's plenty of garbage in there but also some things that are like crack to me. I can't think of an example of a 3 star (bland) because by nature they don't stick in the mind.

(This also assumes giving 0 stars isn't allowed. That'd throw it out of whack...)

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also

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The stock portfolios of more than two dozen members of Congress outperformed the market in 2024. This isn't due to luck or skill. Lawmakers can use privileged information to trade stocks while they’re supposed to be working for you.

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but fr I'll never take it seriously when someone says "i was abused by men, I'm allowed to hate them and anyone trying to show love for men is an MRA" like you know how many of us were abused by our mothers and it's still (rightfully) considered not okay to say that women are all abusers just waiting to kill their children. If you blame violence on someones gender instead of the societal mechanisms that encourage and allow violent and harmful behaviour you're perpetuating that cycle.

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This gotta be the funniest Enterprise-Klingon exchange ever:

[massivelyfuzzybarbarian]

I can’t make pasta any more without mumbling to myself, “wet the drys… then dry the wets…”