saltineofswing

[saltineofswing]

amateurish first effort

[saltineofswing]

[saltineofswing]

You people are four years old

[saltineofswing]

Chat is it normal to have an all-night full-body panic attack about [checks clipboard] renewing your driver’s license?

(Rhetorical I know it’s not)

[saltineofswing]

Comedians in the '70s and cartoons in the '90s: weird how your kids can watch violence and murder on TV but the FCC wants us dead if we say the word nipple.

Internet users in 2025: you didn't warn me that there would be erotic themes in the game you just mentioned which is fucked up because I thought it was going to be a normal "morally struggle with killing people" game but now it's gone too far :-/

[saltineofswing]

No kings in this country! ...except a few of the nice people we found walking along the Venice Beach Boardwalk 👑

Watch the full Game Changer episode on Dropout

[saltineofswing]

[saltineofswing]

i'm feeling controversial today so here's another hot take. and before you type away at your keyboards, know that this is all coming from a south asian.

white leftists have got to stop acting like christianity is the only religion that deserves to be criticized and you cannot touch any other religion because that'd be racist and bigoted. because as an indian who's watching my country progress towards hindu nationalism, this attitude doesn't help at all.

white people see hinduism as this exotic brown religion that's so much more progressive but don't know the violence of the caste system, how it others a large portion of the population on the basis of caste, literally branding them as "untouchables". they teach us in school that this problem is a thing of the past but the caste system is still alive and shows itself in violent ways. and that's not even covering how non hindus are treated in the country. muslims especially are being killed, have their houses bulldozed, businesses destroyed, and are being denied housing, our fucking prime minister called them infiltrators and there's this fear among hindu extremists that they'll outnumber the hindus in the country. portraying hinduism as this exotic religion does a disservice to all those oppressed by the hindutva ideology

similarly, white people see buddhism as this hippie religion that's all about peace but have no idea how extremist buddhists in myanmar have been persecuting the rohingya muslims for years and drive them out of the country.

if anything portraying these religions as exotic hippie brown religions is a type of orientalism itself.

and also y'all have got to realize that just because christianity has institutional power in america doesn't mean there aren't parts of the world where they are persecuted on the basis of religion. yes karen from florida who cries christophobia because she sees rainbow sprinkles on a cake is stupid but christian oppression DOES exist in non western countries where they're a minority. pakistani christians get lynched almost on a daily basis over blasphemy accusations. just look up the case of asia bibi, a pakistani christian woman who was sentenced to death on blasphemy charges because of something she said when she was being denied water because it was "forbidden" for a christian and a muslim to drink from the same utensil and she'd made it unclean just by touching it (which is ALSO rooted in casteism and part of pakistani christians' oppression also comes from the fact that a lot of them are dalit but that's a whole other discussion). and that's just one christian group, this isn't even going into what copts, assyrians, armenians etc have faced and continue to face. saying that christians everywhere are privileged because of american christianity actually harms christian minorites in non western countries.

and one last thing because this post is getting too long: someone being anti america doesn't automatically mean they're the good guys. too many times i've been seeing westerners on twitter dot com praise the fucking taliban just because they hate america. yes, the same taliban who banned education for women, thinks women should be imprisomed at home, and consistently oppresses religious and ethnic minorities in afghanistan. yes, america's war on afghanistan was bad and they SHOULD be called out for their war crimes there. no, the taliban are still not the good guys. BOTH of them are bad. you cannot pretend to care about muslims and brown people if you praise the taliban. because guess what? most of their victims are BROWN MUSLIM WOMEN. but of course white libs who praise them don't rub their two braincells together to make that conclusion.

this post has gotten too long and i've just been rambling so the point of this post is: white "leftists" whose politics are primarily america centric should stop acting like criticism of ideologies like hindutva, buddhist extremism, and islamic extremism BY people affected by these ideologies is the same as racism or religious intolerance because that helps literally no one except the extremist bigots. also america is not the centre of the world, just because something isn't happening in america doesn't mean it isn't happening elsewhere

[saltineofswing]

dire wolf drama has led me to learning that one of the most major anatomical differences between them and all living canids is that they had Massive Dick Bones indicating their swinger lifestyle

[saltineofswing]

Crazy thing about #healing #recovery Small Victories is when you'll have some shit going on that's like, saying this would involve admitting how you used to be doing. You know? Like hey guys good news I'm gonna change my bedsheets this year

[saltineofswing]

you CANNOT read too much old timey fiction because I was playing Raft with the lads this morning and without a THOUGHT said we could sail over to another island "if the wind would consent to blow" & let me tell you. This did not pass by unremarked.

[saltineofswing]

Speaking as a habitual writer of sentences – some of which can be runners-on, if I’m not paying attention – this reads to me as a kludgy attempt to turn a single sentence into a paragraph.

‘The Orc city smoldered’ is a complete thought. ‘Burned down in the wake of battle’, ‘the ground soaked in a knuckle’s depth of blood and ash’, ‘the savage cries of its defenders now silent and still’, and ‘its ruin overseen by the architect of its very destruction’ are all predicative. If you put it all together into a single sentence separated by commas (each predicate modifying ‘The Orc city smoldered’), it would be a hideously lengthy read, but maybe a more sensical one.

Seems like the writer (or the writer’s editor) realized that this was a marathon sentence, and the process of splitting it up was just done at the wrong place. The new sentence doesn’t feel distinct from the previous one, which contributes to the feeling of disconnection and incompleteness IMO.

To say nothing of the content of the passage, the context of which I am blissfully unaware. Seems, um…

:)

there is nothing more reviled than the orc

[saltineofswing]

remember kids, the moral of "Irish and Italians weren't even considered White yet!" isn't "because in those times people were so ignorant they didn't think the Irish were white". the moral is "because white is an unreal category created to justify slavery and ongoing hoarding of power and wealth". It's not that you know better about Italians. It's that the boundaries of the higher caste have changed.

[saltineofswing]

ANOTHER EARTH, FILE 003 – KILLER MOTH

And Here We Find That Most Noble of Nature's Creatures... The Moth

Providing a service to all the people on the internet who think that Killer Moth should wear thigh-high boots. That's, like, everybody, right?

Writeup & gadgets below.

Each page of the file above has its script in the alt text for the image! I thought this would be a fun way to spruce up the write-ups. They won't all be this long, but the format I chose for this gimmick gives me a lot of room to run. Plus, this one is a pretty dramatic deviation from baseline. If you are a Drury Walker fan... I'm sorry for what I did to your boy.

I just thought it would make a really cool concept to bring Killer Moth back to his roots as a Batman hard counter – long before Hush, or Prometheus, or Wrath, or any 'a those fucking jabronis. And I thought, what better way to do that than to mirror Bruce's life experience? What if Cameron Van Cleer never got retconned into Drury Walker? What if Cameron Van Clear had a son?

I mostly go over that in the file above. What I will tell you here, is that I originally did this design for him to appear as an 'NPC' in my fiancé's superhero tabletop campaign (the one with Visage, also ultimately the genesis for me starting the Another Earth project). It is sort of a beautiful risotto of all our favorite superhero genre tropes, settings, and characters.

I wanted to swing his costume all the way in the opposite direction from the unserious throw-up of jumbled colors and patterns (which I love) – make it melodramatic and 'intimidating', which I think becomes goofy in its own way.

I gave the character some traits that I feel make him more of an 'anti-Batman' than, like, Hush or Prometheus or the Joker; Batman's 'Dark Mirrors' tend to just boil down to 'this guy is CRAZY and he's JUST as CLEVER as BATMAN, but he KILLS PEOPLE!' I don't really feel that's an 'Anti-Batman', though, it's just a crazy guy who is super clever and kills people.

This version of Killer Moth shares Bruce's core 'dead parent' motive and 'wealth allowed him access to high-level training' means, but where Bruce is selfless and brave but violent, angry, self-destructive, Cameron is not at his core a violent person; he takes good care of himself; and he is highly pragmatic and will usually bail when things get too tough.

Cameron killed the man who killed his father, and in doing so he achieved closure for himself; Bruce couldn't do that, and so he will never know whether or not it would give him peace. Ironically I think that Cameron is probably more stable than any of the 'Anti-Batmans'. All this isn't quite a job to him, it's more like a priority hobby he is very passionate about (running CleerCorp is his 'job', which he takes seriously – again, where Bruce doesn't even really engage with the management of Wayne Enterprises beyond where it can serve his needs as Batman). Making him a businessman who believes in the idea that the cape community is a market system unto itself, and therefore requires balance on both sides, was a cool way to justify him being sort of morally flexible... again, mirroring Bruce's moral rigidity.

Five songs off of my Killer Moth playlist:

I'm Designer – Queens of the Stone Age

Mojo – Peeping Tom

Dog Eat Dog – Weird Al

Madcap – clipping.

Do Not Go Quietly Unto Your Grave – Morphine

Next... how about somebody who ain't in the Batfamily, huh?

[saltineofswing]

ANOTHER EARTH, FILE 002 – THE JOKER

The Clown Prince Of Crime

There once was a pale man from Gotham,

Who did limerick when he hit rock bottom,

He was quick with a joke,

But limerick left him broke,

'cuz, well, not a whole lot rhymes with 'Gotham'.

Peek beneath for more info

ANOTHER EARTH DATA FILE: THE JOKER [REAL NAME UNKNOWN, AGE UNKNOWN]

Though the self-proclaimed Clown Prince of Crime emerged as a major player in Gotham's underworld shortly after the first appearance of the Batman, the man known only as the Joker rapidly and aggressively asserted himself as Gotham's most violent, unpredictable criminal.

All of the knowledge we have regarding the Joker is largely anecdotal, speculative, or otherwise unsubstantiated. Depending on who you ask, the Joker came from a broken home and was driven to criminal exploits by an abusive father; or, perhaps he is an escaped government/CADMUS experiment, kidnapped or orphaned as a young boy; maybe he was a former associate of the Gotham crime family of your choice, unceremoniously disappeared after a job gone bad. Each backstory the Joker allows to spread has a single consistency, which is also conveniently the only provable in his web of tall tales: it ends in a chemical bath.

Batman, and the small circle of individuals that Batman has disseminated his files and/or feelings to on the matter, believes that the Joker was a small-time crook known as the Red Hood, a rotating figurehead of a petty street gang; on one of his early outings, Batman stopped a robbery at the ACE Chemical plant. Despite his best efforts, the man beneath the Red Hood fell into an illegally-open waste vat full of secret, unregulated ACE chemicals. Batman has repeatedly, extensively, analyzed the chemical composition of this vat – clues to how, or why, the Joker survived elude him.

The chemical bath seems to have done something to the Joker on a genetic level; aside from the obvious bleached skin, his blood is heavily toxified. Who knows precisely what effects that had/has on his mental state, but more materially relevant is the way it changed the composition of his flesh – the Joker's skin and muscle are much more elastic, meaning that his face can stretch and emote beyond the standard range of human emotion.

The Joker's famous toxin, sometimes called 'Joker Venom', is made from a derivative of his own blood. Making the antidote requires access to that source... and unfortunately, his blood will 'spoil' if it goes too long outside of his body and unrefrigerated.

A fickle, violent liar. Responsible for more acts of physical violence and mental torment against the citizens of Gotham than the next three worst offenders combined.

FILE NOTES:

Ah, the Joker. A character that actually isn't even in my top 5 Batman villains under ordinary circumstances. I (mostly) understand the appeal, but I really don't like the way this guy is usually portrayed in contemporary stories across forms of media.

Part of it is a vibe disconnect, but to be perfectly honest, some of it is logistical problems that could be very easily solved by harkening back to Jokers of yore. I like a good, thuggish, Dick Sprang Joker. DCAU is responsible, surprise surprise, but I just like a Joker that looks as intimidating as he acts; a tall and willowy Joker doesn't do anything for me. Just makes me think of David Tennant. This is a man who routinely goes toe-to-toe with a top-three-in-the-world martial artist/athlete! To say nothing of the small army that is the modern Batfamily. I think it's more interesting if he's just as physically intimidating as Batman.

I don't really want to write an essay on why I don't think the Joker is in a narratively interesting place in the toolbox right now, or why I don't like him, because the truth is I actually do! I think that a Joker done right is a really scary character. Key phrase: a Joker done right.

(Sorry to the Joker fans, but I am a Three Jokers apologist. I liked it a lot. Forgive me.)

Things that I feel make a Joker done right: plans are simple, but brutal and clever, and importantly, they always have a point. A punchline, if you will. Even if the punchline is just chaos. A spectrum of emotions, most of which are false – but the real ones are glee, and rage. Vulnerable to being negged. Any sympathy you may feel for him is a ploy to make you vulnerable.

Crucial: he has to do something truly, unrepentantly, savagely vile.

[saltineofswing]

Can people from the United States stop making jokes about “WW3 😜”….there are people in Iran evacuating their neighborhoods, places they grew up, and all YOU are experiencing is watching the news and a few TikToks….

You are not at war, you will most likely never see war, and if your “dark humor” is coming at the expense of others then it is not dark humor, you’re just an asshole.