#Hal Brands

[carolinemillerbooks]

New Post has been published on Books by Caroline Miller

New Post has been published on https://www.booksbycarolinemiller.com/musings/happy-90th-gloria/

Happy 90th Gloria!

A writer near my age admitted on Facebook that though she loved the feel of paper between her fingers and the smell of a new book, she’d shifted to an e-reader. No longer comfortable with small print, she needed an electronic device to adjust for size.    Much in life is a tradeoff.  The earth has a polar wobble, which is natural, but growing more pronounced because humans are pulling quantities of water from the aquifer. Global construction is at an all-time high. That makes sand, a key ingredient in cement, a valuable commodity. The scarcer it becomes, the more illegal mining grows.  Today,  quarrying sand is a $200 billion to $300 billion industry, making it more valuable than gold, logging, and fishing combined. Developments in technology may ameliorate some of these challenges. Reading devices that adjust print size is an example.  Sometimes, though, the remedy poses new problems. Think of all those passwords we need to maintain our internet accounts.     A woman In my late 80s, I’d like to see the world slow down. Is there technology for that?  In his book, Successful Aging, Daniel J. Levitin warns that clinging to the past isn’t good for human health.  Old folks should keep looking forward. That’s easy for him to say.  He’s not at the end of the line trying to keep up. On the plus side, Levitin writes that old folks have an edge over the young. Wisdom enables them to make good decisions. They’ve lived long enough to discern patterns in nature and human behavior.  A newborn may cry, terrified by its first glimpse of the sun, but adults head for the beach hoping for enough sand to throw down a towel.   Lacking experience, young people’s judgments are prone to err. Many, for example, criticize Joe Biden’s slow response to the tragedy unfolding in Gaza.  As the head of a powerful country, they presume he has levers to pull to affect change. Yet not since Teddy Roosevelt’s interventions in Latin America during the 1900s has an American President imagined he could interfere with another nation’s sovereignty and escape paying a political price–the incursions being short-lived or ending in failure. The heady era of being a dominant player among weaker countries is history. Today, democratic nations exercise diplomacy rather than brute force.  Biden has an edge on that score.  He knows the world players, the genesis of foreign quarrels, and the cards each country’s leader is likely to hold.  True, he hasn’t sold Benjamin Netanyahu on a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine. But Netanyahu isn’t thinking about the future. An unpopular figure in his country, he clings to power because of the war, holding fast to it the way a man lost at sea clings to an ice float even though it’s melting.  Youth may see Biden’s politics in the current conflict as uncaring, but their viewpoint may be too simple.  The suffering in Gaza is unconscionable, agreed. But, so far, Biden has kept our alliances intact in the Middle East; held Iran at bay; secured world trade by monitoring the Suez Canal, and made talks about a two-state solution credible. Not bad for a man forced to dance with wolves. In a bad world, only a fool looks for rainbows.  Hal Brands in an edition of Foreign Affairs argues that given the current morality,  “…the only way to protect a world fit for freedom is to court impure partners and engage in impure acts.” (“The Age of Amorality,” by Hal Brands, Foreign Affairs March/April, pg. 106.) Brands’ advice may be repugnant to young minds and old ones as well, but the difference between youth and age is that the latter is more pragmatic.  Older people know that facing reality doesn’t mean giving up ideals.  It means they may see taking a step backward as a prelude to moving forward.  Nothing I’ve written diminishes the contributions young people make in the world.  Innovation flows from their plastic brains the way stars burst from a supernova.  I doubt an 80-something could have invented Bitcoin. Because our complex problems require complex responses, neither youth nor age should be banished from the stage.  We achieve more when we make room for each other.   Gloria Steinem turns 90 this month.  After the loss of Roe v. Wade, she hasn’t given up on women’s rights.  When a fan asked if she was planning to toss her torch to someone else, her reply was unequivocal.  “I’m holding on to my torch. I’ll let other people light theirs from mine.”  (Successful Aging, by Daniel J. Levitin, Random House, 2020, (large print edition by Penguin) pg. 662.)  Happy Birthday, Gloria!

[puppetmaster13u]

Prompt 168

So. Apparently halfas are like phoenixes or something, which Danny would’ve really liked to know. 

See, usually with ghosts if they’re forced to retreat to their cores they reform as was, but apparently, since they’re still partially living, schrodinger's people and all that, halfas have to regrow their body from scratch. At least that’s what he’s understanding from Frostbite. 

But how come he has to deal with it? It’s Dan’s fault for trying to pull such a stunt! Oh, it’s either him or Vlad? Well fuck, he might have calmed down and is going to therapy in both the living realm and the Zone, but he’s waaay not equipped to raise a child except for like, monetarily wise. 

Well dammit, how long will this core incubation thing last, he has his new job in… let him check which offer he accepted again… He has his new job in Coast City that he needs to finish packing for and then all the rest of the stuff to do. 

What do you mean it’ll take months?! He doesn’t have months?! Urgh, fine. At least being a mortician isn’t that exciting, nor dangerous. Just hand him Dan’s core and he’ll figure things out for the living side of things. He’s sure Tucker and Sam wouldn’t be against helping, if only to try and claim favorite aunt or uncle spots. 

[ufonaut]

"a disaster beyond description" - the parallax view on parallax (& coast city's destruction)

i've often talked about the importance of pre-parallax retcon hal jordan, what a radical move his downfall had been for an art medium so uniquely focused on status quo and how much walking that back in post-2005 continuity damaged the character & his development. however, something i've become increasingly interested in lately is the outsider point of view on the magnitude of coast city's destruction and hal's descent into madness -- the reverberations of one of the darkest days in the dcu were far and wide for a good long while there but rarely acknowledged outside of nostalgia pieces nowadays and even more rarely understood as a thoroughly visceral, well-written, well-planned arc that intentionally portrayed the superhero world as largely unsympathetic to the trauma of one of their own but the average civilian as grappling with that loss nearly on the same scale that hal did.

to that effect, i thought i would show a highlights reel of this outsider POV and how much it adds to the weight of the pre-2005 story. while i've accepted some tie-ins to major events (ie zero hour 1994, final night 1996), this will feature titles entirely unrelated to green lantern presented in real life chronological order by publication date in order to showcase the impact that's compelled me so (that's no convergence: green lantern, no legends of the dcu #33-36, etc).

"every office, every home, every school and hospital is atomized. the west coast and its entire ecosystem is instantaneously shattered-- and more than seven million men, women and children that once called the coast city area home-- die."

to set the scene, the explosion that destroys coast city actually appears in superman 1987 #80 (cover date: aug 1993) as part of hank henshaw and mongul's plan.

the destruction had spread as far as santa barbara & the los padres national forest. getting closer to ground zero, hank henshaw also proceeds to resolutely take care of a handful of the sole survivors:

(adventures of superman 1987 #503, cover date: aug 1993)

you all know the reading order here. past the return of superman and the events of emerald twilight, the first outsiders to have gotten the news are the darkstars

whose immediate course of action is to brand hal jordan a criminal (darkstars #23, cover date: aug 1994)

and as zero hour-induced temporal anomalies keep coming up, the darkstars start seriously considering further tampering with time in order to prevent "the creation of a power-mad monster" (darkstars #24, cover date: sept 1994).

it's a sentiment that the majority of hal's justice league colleagues share, as zero hour: crisis in time and the final night both tell us, but a more sympathetic view comes two years later in the spectre 1992 #47 (cover date: nov 1996)

and a more neutral one from waverider in superman: the doomsday wars #2 (cover date: dec 1998)

interestingly enough, more details of the in-universe perception of hal's actions comes from deadman: dead again

where we learn that "sources close to the JLA" have actually issued a press statement naming hal as wholly responsible for the green lantern corps massacre, with no hint that they've been equally forthcoming about the motive behind his actions (deadman: dead again #4, cover date: oct 2001)

the last pre-retcon word goes to superman: day of doom #3 (cover date: jan 2003), a sobering portrayal of the immense horror of coast city's annihilation and subsequently a look into the reality that had made hal snap:

post-retcon, nostalgia pieces like dcu: legacies #8 (feb 2011) and dc retroactive: superman - the 80s (oct 2011) both treat the mad-with-grief version of the story as the truth -- as does the 2015 convergence event --but outside of these few instances, the tour de force of storytelling that is this years-long arc has been cast aside in favor of an unnecessary retcon. as the zero hour: crisis in time 30th anniversary approaches, i'd say it's just the right time to remember that hal (unrepentant hal, power-hungry hal, hell-bent on making everything right hal) had had a perfectly proportional reaction to the tragedy he'd endured, if not outright a justified one.

[scorchedhearth]

the green lanterns pulling up to an official heroes event of some sort dressed up like this, all thinking they’re gonna drip with style only to find out they are all several decades behind in fashion and cultural awareness

i cannot stress enough that this is not for a joke. they are all four convinced they are wearing the height of fashion and everyone will find them dashing only to have the truth slapped in their face: they are way, way behind

[ladymariayuri]

#FEMINISM swag mode emma early prototype will be real in 5 seconds. this time with enough behavioral changes to actually be recognizable as modded but probably only if you're deeply autistic about this game and it looks sort of okay i guess. i have also integrated metal gear rising esque weapon glints / vfxes to indicate different things because i wanted to abuse animation blending to make funny things happen at the cost of human reaction time. anyway this is my beautiful daughter named You Will Learn To Parry Ashina Cross You Do Not Have Any Other Options. coming to a nexusmods page near you probably never because finding new ways to do things without slapping hyperarmor on everything like a chump is hard

[jasontoddenthusiastt]

Thanks to this post on Reddit, I realized when one (1) unreliable narrator Jason Peter Todd was born. Is it any surprise that it was when he died :)))))))))

Your whole life??? I can count on one hand the number of times you got angry. Right now you’re hoping Sheila will make it to Heaven after she got you killed,

And you still consider her your mom. You lived and died an angel.

You had no clue what was going to happen. You were a child who never should have been left alone by his parent.

You and me both, Boston.

Deadman: Dead Again issue #2

[dandybambiandy]

I had to peel myself from playing tears of the kingdom to indulge in my other brain rot lmao

[kirby-the-gorb]

[wwprice1]

The iconic DC artwork of Jerry Ordway!

[fdelopera]

gotta say, no one hates and is more disrespectful to fans of the work they’ve created and produced than ALW and Cammack.

[goatsghost]

i’m gonna actually cry over this!!! they abandoned him!!!! in space!!!

[dollwritesarchive]

hal panels that just give me a feeling ™️ part one of a thousand

[septembersghost]

2005-2008ish!me who wrote endless copious emotional essays on her lj about sweeney being a love story, about every thread of sweeney being about love and its loss and its corruption and how society tries to own and consume it and how that love that once held rescue becomes ruinous and how all its tragedy is in that ravenous need and grief is so validated by this article.

[ufonaut]

Jordan loved the Coast City he knew-- and soon its destruction he'll seek to undo. To blot out this, his darkest hour, he knows that he will need more power. Thus the madness of grief will leave its scars in a swath of destruction he'll cut 'cross the stars.

Deadman: Dead Again (2001) #4

(Steve Vance, M.D. Bright & Rick Burchett)

[johnvenus]

Neal Adams Tribute

[033h]

finished my apple seltzer from yesterday and my dad sent me a picture of a cat in his neighborhood that I had met and taken a picture of two years ago! so it’s okay and it’s good