#basically my store's general manager quit out of nowhere yesterday

[summer-arts]

hello! the place i've been working at might be permanently shutting down within the next couple days (long story lol) so i'll likely be out of a job for awhile. any commissions during this time would be very appreciated while i job hunt! <3

more info can be found on my commissions page

[davidmann95]

Superman’s 10 Best of the ‘10s

Good Miracle Monday, folks! The first third Monday of May of a new decade for that matter, and while that means that today in the DC Universe Superman just revealed his secret identity to the world on the latest anniversary of that time he defeated the devil, in ours it puts a capstone on a solid 10 years of his adventures now in the rear view mirror, ripe for reevaluation. And given there’s a nice solid ‘10′ right there I’ll go ahead with the obvious and list my own top ten for Superman comics of the past decade, with links in the titles to those I’ve spoken on in depth before - maybe you’ll find something you overlooked, or at least be reminded of good times.

A plethora of honorable mentions: I’m disqualifying team-ups or analogue character stories, but no list of the great Superman material of the last decade would be complete without bringing up Cave Carson Has A Cybernetic Eye #7, Avengers 34.1, Irredeemable, Sideways Annual #1, Supreme: Blue Rose, Justice League: Sixth Dimension, usage of him in Wonder Twins, (somewhat in spite of itself) Superior, from all I’ve heard New Super-Man, DCeased #5, and Batman: Super Friends. And while they couldn’t quite squeeze in, all due praise to the largely entertaining Superman: Unchained, the decades’ great Luthor epic in Superman: The Black Ring, a brilliant accompaniment to Scott Snyder’s work with Lex in Lex Luthor: Year of the Villain, the bonkers joy of the Superman/Luthor feature in Walmart’s Crisis On Infinite Earths tie-in comics, Geoff Johns and John Romita’s last-minute win in their Superman run with their final story 24 Hours, Tom Taylor’s quiet criticism of the very premise he was working with on Injustice and bitter reflection on the changing tides for the character in The Man of Yesterday, the decades’ most consistent Superman ongoing in Bryan Miller and company’s Smallville Season 11, and Superman: American Alien, which probably would have made the top ten but has been dropped like a hot potato by one and all for Reasons. In addition are several stories from Adventures of Superman, a book with enough winners to merit a class of its own: Rob Williams and Chris Weston’s thoughtful Savior, Kyle Killen and Pia Guerra’s haunting The Way These Things Begin, Marc Guggenheim and Joe Bennett’s heart-wrenching Tears For Krypton, Christos Gage and Eduardo Francisco’s melancholy Flowers For Bizarro, Josh Elder and Victor Ibanez’s deeply sappy but deeply effective Dear Superman, Ron Marz and Doc Shaner’s crowdpleasing Only Child, and Kelly Sue DeConnick and Valentine DeLandro’s super-sweet Mystery Box.

10. Greg Pak/Aaron Kuder’s Action Comics

Oh, what might’ve been. In spite of an all-timer creative team I can’t justify listing this run any higher given how profoundly and comprehensively compromised it is, from the status quo it was working with to the litany of ill-conceived crossovers to regular filler artists to its ignominious non-ending. But with the most visceral, dynamic, and truly humane take on Clark Kent perhaps of all time that still lives up to all Superman entails, and an indisputably iconic instant-classic moment to its name, I can’t justify excluding it either.

9. Action Comics #1000

Arguably the climax to the decade for the character as his original title became the first superhero comic to reach a 1000th issue. While any anthology of this sort is a crapshoot by nature, everyone involved here seemed to understand the enormity of the occasion and stepped up as best they could; while the lack of a Lois Lane story is indefensible, some are inevitably bland, and one or two are more than a bit bizarre, by and large this was a thoroughly charming tribute to the character and his history with a handful of legitimate all-timer short stories.

8. Faster Than A Bullet

Much as Adventures of Superman was rightfully considered an oasis amidst the New 52′s worst excesses post-Morrison and in part pre-Pak, few stories from it seem well-remembered now, and even at the time this third issue inexplicably seemed to draw little attention. Regardless, Matt Kindt and Stephen Segovia’s depiction of an hour in the life of Superman as he saves four planets first thing in the morning without anyone noticing - while clumsy in its efforts at paralleling the main events with a literal subplot of a conversation between Lois and Lex - is one of the best takes I can recall on the scope on which he operates, and ultimately the purpose of Clark Kent.

7. Man and Superman

Seemingly geared on every front against me, built as it was on several ideas of how to handle Superman’s origin I legitimately hate, and by a writer whose work over the years has rarely been to my liking, Marv Wolfman and Claudio Castellini’s Man and Superman somehow came out of nowhere to be one of my favorite takes on Clark Kent’s early days. With a Metropolis and characters within it that feel not only alive but lived-in, it’s shocking that a story written and drawn over ten years before it was actually published prefigured so many future approaches to its subject, and felt so of-the-moment in its depiction of a 20-something scrambling to figure out how to squeeze into his niche in the world when it actually reached stores.

6. Brian Bendis’s run

Controversial in the extreme, and indeed heir to several of Brian Bendis’s longstanding weaknesses as a writer, his work on The Man of Steel, Superman, and Action Comics has nevertheless been defined at least as much by its ambition and intuitive grasp of its lead, as well as fistfuls of some of the best artistic accompaniment in the industry. At turns bombastic space action, disaster flick, spy-fi, oddball crime serial, and family drama, its assorted diversions and legitimate attempts at shaking up the formula - or driving it into new territory altogether, as in the latest, apparently more longterm-minded unmasking of Clark Kent in Truth - have remained anchored and made palatable by an understanding of Superman’s voice, insecurities, and convictions that go virtually unmatched.

5. Strange Visitor

The boldest, most out-of-left-field Superman comic of the past 10 years, Joe Keatinge took the logline of Adventures of Superman to do whatever creators wanted with the character and, rather than getting back to a classic take absent from the mainline titles at the time as most others did, used the opportunity for a wildly expansive exploration of the hero from his second year in action to his far-distant final adventure. Alongside a murderer’s row of artists, Keatinge pulled off one of the few comics purely about how great Superman is that rather than falling prey to hollow self-indulgence actually managed to capture the wonder of its subject.

4. Superman: Up In The Sky

And here’s the other big “Superman’s just the best” comic the decade had to offer that actually pulled it off. Sadly if reasonably best-known for its one true misfire of a chapter, with the increasing antipathy towards Tom King among fans in general likely not helping, what ended up overlooked is that this is a stone-cold classic on moment of arrival. Andy Kubert turns in work that stands alongside the best of his career, Tom King’s style is honed to its cleanest edge by the 12-pager format and subject matter, and the quest they set their lead out on ends up a perfect vehicle to explore Superman’s drive to save others from a multitude of angles. I don’t know what its reputation will end up being in the long-term - I was struck how prosaic and subdued the back cover description was when I got this in hardcover, without any of the fanfare or critic quotes you’d expect from the writer of Mister Miracle and Vision tackling Superman - but while its one big problem prevents me from ranking it higher, this is going to remain an all-timer for me.

3. Jeff Loveness’s stories Help and Glasses

Cheating shamelessly here, but Jeff Loveness’s Help with David Williams and Glasses with Tom Grummett are absolutely two halves of the same coin, a pair of theses on Superman’s enduring relevance as a figure of hope and the core of Lois and Clark’s relationship that end up covering both sides of Superman the icon and Superman the guy. While basically illustrated essays, any sense of detached lecturing is utterly forbidden by the raw emotion on display here that instantly made them some of the most acclaimed Superman stories of the last several years; they’re basically guaranteed to remain in ‘best-of’ collections from now until the end of time.

2. Superman Smashes The Klan

A bitter race for the top spot, but #2 is no shame here; while not quite my favorite Superman story of the past ten years, it’s probably the most perfectly executed. While I don’t think anyone could have quite expected just *how* relevant this would be at the top of the decade, Gene Yang and Gurihiru put together an adventure in the best tradition of the Fleischer shorts and the occasional bystander-centered episodes of Batman: The Animated Series to explore racism’s both overt and subtle infections of society’s norms and institutions, the immigrant experience, and both of its leads’ senses of alienation and justice. Exciting, stirring, and insightful, it’s debuted to largely universal acknowledgement as being the best Superman story in years, and hopefully it’ll be continued to be marketed as such long-term.

1. Grant Morrison’s Action Comics

When it came time to make the hard choice, it came in no small part down to that I don’t think we would have ever seen a major Golden Age Superman revival project like Smashes The Klan in the first place if not for this. Even hampering by that godawful Jim Lee armor, inconsistent (if still generally very good) art, and a fandom that largely misunderstood it on arrival can’t detract from that this is Grant Morrison’s run on a Superman ongoing, a journey through Superman’s development as a character reframed as a coherent arc that takes him from Metropolis’s most beaten-down neighborhoods to the edge of the fifth dimension and the monstrous outermost limits of ‘Superman’ as a concept. It launched discussions of Superman as a corporate icon and his place relative to authority structures that have never entirely vanished, introduced multiple all-time great new villains, and made ‘t-shirt Superman’ a distinct era and mode of operation for the character that I’m skeptical will ever entirely go away. No other work on the character this decade had the bombast, scope, complexity, or ambition of this run, with few able to match its charm or heart. And once again, it was, cannot stress this enough, Grant Morrison on an ongoing Superman book.

[sinesalvatorem]

Dancing Through Life

It’s quite possible that I learned more yesterday than in any other day of my life. However, one of the things I learned was that compressing information is an important part of life, so I’m going to try writing down a couple of the highlight realisations.

So, the day before yesterday, I realised that my stims were an important feature of my cognition. That they contained information produced by the process of me thinking, in much the same way that the verbal thoughts and mental images I experience are. In fact, the external movements are just as fundamentally important to thinking as the internal dialogue is.

I’ve always had a sense that something was missing, cognitively. That, even though I can in theory think quite fast, I was missing all the memory I should have available for processing those thoughts. I didn’t have enough registers to store the complex structures I was coming up with. I couldn’t put a thought down or I might never find it again. I was stuck.

Yesterday I found those registers. It turns out that entire complex action patterns can be compressed and stored as a series of muscle pulses - a sort of bitecode for the body. If I was stimming, I could hold a consistent pattern of these pulses over time, meaning I could remember a thought for longer even when it exited my verbal awareness. At no point yesterday did I explicitly notice that this was how to describe what was happening, but that’s what I was using to function.

I’ve long known I can’t think well when I don’t walk a lot. In fact, it can typically make the difference between depression and vitality. Earlier this week, I was feeling really down about not talking to people, but this turned out to be pretty much just my not going out walking in the sunshine while I had the cold. The moment I did that again, my mental skies cleared. It’s amazing how demonstrably biological of a system we are.

And part of this is how we store so much of our lives in muscle memory. I can type this whole essay despite being dyslexic because I have automatic patterns firing to tell me where to place my fingers on the keyboard. I don’t even look. Which is valuable, because it means I can do this really quickly, much like all the other habitual behaviours in my life.

While I wondered through the hills and valleys of San Francisco, I confidently offloaded various cognitive tasks to my low-level muscle patterns. They’re nowhere near as fast as my conscious mind, but they get the job done. When I wanted to go home, I just set an intention of going home and then tossed the thought to the side, allowing my legs to bring me home.

By dancing through my day, I was able to learn way more than I ever have before, because I could actually remember the things I picked up and bring them back for later. It was no longer a desperate race to figure out what the Most Important Thought was and pursue it and not squander this moment. I could set things aside, confident I could reach back out and pluck them again.

I finally felt abundance mindset down to the bone. I finally knew that, yes, I really do have everything I could ever need. Up in the hills surrounding Daly City, I became a G-d. And, having achieved that, I finally got some perspective.

For one thing, I realised I was safe. When I truly saw what the peak of healthy human cognition was - running and leaping across the savanna with rippling waves of muscle and thought - I realised that I vastly outclassed anything that could threaten me. I pretty much lost my fear of dogs, learned when I was chased by one as a kid. I wondered into nature and danced with the trees and tried to learn from the rhythms of ecology.

A very very lossy approximation of the complicated thing I realised up there is that I concluded I was immortal. This is an incorrect summary, but as a model it brings you some useful places. Let’s say I’m an information-processing system that gains value from creating pretty patterns - and I just learned I’m immortal. What does that mean to me?

For one, an end to scarcity. All my life, I’ve lived in a conscious state of deprivation. Of there not being enough oxygen in here. A lot of this was due to other people - people who hurt me if I acted weird, with the stimming being a part of that. People who forced me to do work of their desire, preventing me from controlling my own time. People who controlled how far I could walk and what I could investigate. Not allowing me inputs or space to process.

But the thing that matters to me is that the pretty patterns be instantiated. That the Good be actualised. It doesn’t actually matter when fundamentally. The constraints on what kind of patterns I’ll make (ie, impacts on the world in general) can all kind of be taken as one measure of how much room there is to operate in.

I felt scarcity because I felt like I would never be given enough breathing room to do something meaningful. I was also basically convinced I was going to be killed by someone at some point soon, so I didn’t think I had the space to make something deep and great.

My biggest fear was of being a failed child prodigy - because I just had no faith in being around to be an adult success. At 13 I started working on the Riemann Hypothesis, on the assumption that realistically I had 5 years left to do something Great before I got kicked out on the street and died. All of that melted away. I could see myself living on long enough to make any amount of building for tomorrow worthwhile.

I also learned a lot about what scarcity can do to someone.

There are various patterns that we perceive as pleasant. Symmetries are a good example. More complex patterns which still manage to be technically correct are generally perceived as more pleasant, but they have the downside of requiring more room - both in space and time. If you think you don’t have that, it makes sense to instead make a small and simple pattern, and then just repeat it a lot to get more pleasure.

Thus, if you don’t have much concern for tomorrow, you should sink everything into creating pleasure now. Mood-altering drugs! Risky sex! Thrill-seeking crimes! All the attractions of nihilistic teenagers are the universal attractors of a foreshortened future - I’m going out soon, so might as well go out with the best rush I can get my hands on.

This was also plain from the dance of the drug addicts I saw on the sidewalk while out. Except, well, they didn’t dance - they couldn’t. What I observed were their muscle movements, which generally consisted of strained forward motion while beset by extremely simple and repetitive ticks in various muscle groups. The worse their condition, the more muscle groups were in rebellion, and the more dissonant they were, until the individual was effectively beating himself up. (Yes, it was always men this far gone.)

The pattern of internal rebellion is fundamentally a product of lack of internal trust and of long-term rhythms, without which your muscles can’t coordinate except sporadically. In some biological sense, your muscles “want” the release of relaxing tension. If you keep a muscle tensed at all times, out of almost a lack of concern for the well being of your parts, it will decide you are a tyrant and try to overthrow you.

We often imagine ourselves grand sovereigns of our bodies, but this is an illusion of top-down order and mastery. Your cells have been forged together in a pact of trust and cooperation by evolution’s insistence that they’re better off together than alone. If you don’t act in such a way that every cell is, to a first approximation, benefited by the union, then pockets of mutiny will form - from chronic pain to cancer.

Oh, and most systems are like this. Is your psyche broken, warped, or in internal upheaval? Well, have you been living a life such that all your psychological drives feel attended to? If not, then no wonder some are trying to yank the steering wheel! Apply this lens appropriately to politics, economics, Trump, Brexit, and any items you own that might be in disrepair.

This post is just scratching the surface, but I think this is a reasonable summary of what I learned. Not at all because it contains what I learned, but because I think it conveys a detailed enough prescription that someone who followed this through could probably unravel the rest of what was worth mentioning. If you can also clear as much of the fog as I did by dancing your own dance, you too can see what I did up on that hill.

Which is why I’d really like to teach dance classes at some point, if there are interested local folks. Not, like, a specific style of dance - I’ve never learned a style of dance myself. I just mean helping people navigate the internal obstacles that prevent letting your thoughts flow into your muscles, since I now have a great deal of introspective access to the psychology of doing so. And, hopefully, I can give a hand to people in expanding more fully into themselves.

Today I’ve been completely refreshed. I’ve woken up into a life that has meaning and structure eons long. The beat of my longest period of oscillation is so slow that I have no urgent want for anything. Everything can be given over to its proper time and place, and it will come back around when next it’s needed. The ships I send out come home to dock. I can always trust my loose ends to be wrapped up by the time I’m done.

[voluptuarian]

Thanks to shitty rural internet and the move I’ve been incommunicado for the last two weeks. We still don’t have any real internet set up, and even in the middle of campus free restaurant wifi is always undependable, so it’ll be awhile before I’m on regularly again, but I wanted to update on what’s been going on with me recently.

Good stuff

@nativepeach​ and I our finally in our new apartment! It’s still a mess but we’re out of our parent’s house (and away from my dad, thank God) and starting to get settled in.

School starts next week! I’m taking a math class, which is going to suck, but I’m also taking an art class and really looking forward to it.

A local store agreed to let me sell my handmade jewelry through them. I have to set up a time to go in and deliver the stuff/go over things with them. I’m super excited about it!

Our brother lives not far away and he drove over two nights in a row (bearing free Pizza Hut no less) to hang out and play Until Dawn with us

@nativepeach​ got a job at the Panera down the street

She and I got to watch the eclipse yesterday, and have also started exploring the campus area and trying out the bus system (legitimate public transport? In America?!)

We’ve also been trying out some of the local restaurants, including a 24 hour cookie place that delivers. (Also, everything is open late here, and almost everything delivers.)

Donald Trump looked at the eclipse and I hope it blinds him

Bad stuff

It took us four days to get the free internet at the apartment working, and not only can you only use it on one device at a time, but it disconnected on me 5 times within 7 minutes and appears basically useless

so now we have to decide on/arrange to set up WOW or Spectrum and arrange the funds for that

My dad was a complete dick to me the last month I was staying with my parents, and outdid himself the day we moved out, the highlight being him talking “about” me loudly to my mom about how I’ll never find a husband and that I need therapy because I dared to be upset by his behavior

My mom always gets upset and aloof with me after I have any conflict with him, as if it my issues with him somehow carry over to her, so now she’s kind of giving the cold shoulder

The only Walmart within reachable distance is way out of the way, and there’s no Michael’s anywhere that buses go 

It’s hot a fuck everywhere. I am always sweating, even naked in my own apartment I can’t leave the living room without sprouting a sweat mustache.

There is literally like no counter space in this apartment at all, we’re chopping vegetables on the edge of the kitchen sink while we cook,, and propping ingredient plates on boxes.

Having the house a mess, 50% of our belongings in boxes or strewn around, with nowhere to put anything or do anything, for like, the fifth straight week now is killing my mind and my soul.

The only metaphysical shop in the area isn’t hiring.

We found out last week that, asides from $800 we can use to buy books in their bookstore and nowhere else, our college doesn’t release loan funds to students until two months into the term. Because they want students to be “successful”. Never mind a bunch of us have rent to pay and food to buy that we need money for and will have no way of affording for two months. (They advised us to just tell our landlords they wouldn’t have rent for two months-- sounds like a good way to evicted.) My mother has enough money in savings to loan us funds during that time, which means that we can survive alright, but also that I, a grown ass woman, am being denied my own money by my college and having to have my mother pay my way out, once again.

I got hired at the same Panera as @nativepeach​ at the same time, and was pretty much instantly targeted by the megabitch manager who sent me home on my second day of training because I brought a drink in with me, and who threatened to fire me the fourth day because I a. asked her to repeat something she’d said because I hadn’t heard it and she decided my expecting her to repeat something was my “having an attitude” and b. my telling her that she was wrong about my attitude was inherently disrespectful, after which point I quit and left on the spot. (It would be less troubling to me if this wasn’t a pattern that I’d had repeated over and over in my professional life.) Now I’m jobless again.

I’ve felt really bad emotionally lately for no apparent reason, no doubt made worse by the stress of moving. Work issues, the underlying stress of knowing that I have no ability to connect with people period that I’ve been struggling with for almost a year, are just exacerbating this generally bluesiness

AND my ever-present body images issues have also flared up really strongly this month, and being on campus has only made it worse. Every girl here is young, normal-sized, and at least normal-looking, all wearing shorts and tank tops and sundresses. Walking through town and knowing I could go into any restaurant, store, or room in the area and pretty much guarantee I’d be the ugliest woman in it really fucking sucks.