#existential rambles

[essence-inked]

Sometimes when I'm feeling overwhelmed about change, I think about the Carnian pluvial episode, when massive volcanic eruptions set off two million years of rain, and at the end of it the earth was both still the earth and also fundamentally different.

I think about how, when the two-million-year rainstorm stopped, so many species had gone extinct, and just as many had taken their place, to the point where the biodiversity was just as much on either side, and yet so very changed.

I think about how that isn't better or worse, it just Is, and how sometimes volcanoes erupt, sometimes it rains for two million years, sometimes the person you became looks nothing like the person you were before, but if you delve into the geologic records of you, you can track all the changes and all the endings and beginnings and becomings, and you are the you before the rainstorm, and during it, and you will eventually change just as much again, and the person you were when the rain stopped will one day sink into the fossil record too.

And I think about how right now I am here, walking on the crust of an ever-changing world, about how I am just as forever-new and forever-old as the soil beneath my feet, about bow change is tangled up in our very bones, and sometimes, it rains for two million years, and the world becomes something new.

[essence-inked]

Damnit, scrolling through the posts from the internet people in my phone wasn't supposed to give me this many emotions...

hey man I found a piece of your soul stuck in the text messages of old friends you don’t speak to anymore. do you want it back

[sortanonymous]

This is a comment I stumbled upon a while ago and I just can't stop thinking about that fact. And honestly, it's the main reason I just don't really believe in an afterlife. (It doesn't plague me with dread or anything, it's just something eerie that fascinates, yet unsettles and unnerves me.) Every bit of our consciousness and very existence is dependent on just electrochemistry. Everything that makes you you is from how those chemicals and electricity work and react to everything. All those electric and chemical reactions like a computer. It is amazing how they come together to make us such complex humans. And yet, when a computer completely dies, nothing's left of the data locally. So it makes perfect sense that once that electrochemistry breaks badly enough, that's it. No more thoughts, no more dreams, no more being. You cease to exist forever, and you don't even realize it. Just like you were never conceived. Again, it doesn't dog me down or anything, it's just so unnerving yet bizarrely fascinating to me in its sheer finality. And of course, given how unlikely it is for us to get that chance at existence, may as well make the most of it instead of dwelling on how it ends. Because why waste such powerful electricity and chemicals like that?

[forgettable-au]

FORGETTABLE-AU (page 97-100)

* Where could she be?

[BEGINNING] [PREVIOUS] [CONTINUE]

[potato-lord-but-not]

ep 50 save me

[essence-inked]

This hits so very hard - I went from being incredibly lonely to finding more love and home and belonging than I knew what to do with, and even though it's been this way for years now, sometimes I'll still be smacked with the realization that, holy crap, this is all really happening. Like, I'll just be going about my day, and then something as simple as a message from a friend or a quick hug or coming home at night and seeing the windows lit up will hit me square in the chest, and I will become so suddenly overwhelmed with how wonderful it all is.

OP, you put this into words in such a beautiful way, thank you.

on love arriving unannounced

[bruhstation]

*Breaks into your house to stare wistfully out the window* Do you ever think that CTHenry is, at least by some perceptions, a corpse being kept alive by gold dust and the whimsy of a goddess whose motives are unknown? I do. *Puffs on bubble pipe* Anyway. I'm still holding out hope for a happy ending for our Miserable Train Gays. Iram gentlemen. Have a good day 💗

out of sight, out of mind

[essence-inked]

Sometimes I feel crushing existential dread, but then I remember I can collect shiny trinkets from all the special places I go and gently place them in one of my compartmentalized containers and label them with what makes the memory they’re attached to important to me, and that doesn’t really fix the existential dread, but it does mean I can experience it along with the notion of having trinkets

[jesncin]

Cape Comics and the Unsung exploited creatives that make them

Here's something that happens a lot. A superman fan finds me through my supes fan comics, and so they look up the rest of my blog. They're surprised that I don't fanboy over Superman 24/7. That a lot of my biggest write ups about the character are critical of how he's written. They're also taken aback by how I don't like My Adventures with Superman, Absolute Superman, and that I'm not tripping over myself to praise James Gunn's upcoming Superman movie.

So they tough it out. They like my fan comics and just skim past the times I'm critical of the things I like. This is fine of course, no one has to engage with everything I make- no one's forcing you to do that. But sometimes it really gets to this fan how "wrong" I am for being critical of Superman. How dare you make such nice, hopeful, optimistic Superman fan comics and be critical of all the nice Superman media there is now! Across-the-social medias but especially on twitter, is where I get this kind of reader. I'm pigeonholed as "the fan artist with great art but bad takes." You might recall on here it's the "this blog is too smug and superior to be worth wading through to read the good comics." incident. They're far from the only one.

Something that's always struck me about this kind of fan is how uninterested they are in the artist behind the art. If you're so surprised at how you've never seen an Immigrant Superman take like mine, wouldn't you be curious about the thought process that made an interpretation like that possible? I've seen readers who like my clois comics that then go on to read posts like my "Failure of Asian Lois Lane" essay. These kind of readers then discover that my take on Lois exists because I'm unsatisfied with how most Asian!Loises are handled in canon. That my comics exist as critique to the canon material. There's a recognition that these fan comics are informed by my personal experiences. I love these kind of readers. They're the type who eat up the homework posts I put under my fan comics and seek out context. That's good intellectual curiosity to have.

But this other kind of fan -the ones who like my fan comics but hate the critical thought and personal experience that make those very comics possible- is culturally representative of how a lot of cape comic fans are. They don't engage with my comics as art, but as content of their favorite character. They see me post comics that present Superman positively and think it's hypocritical when I'm negative about the character. Just enjoy the content, ignore the artist. Ignore what they bring to the character. That's how this fan copes.

DC as a company loves fans like this. It's a type of brand loyalty corporations dream of. On bluseky, I briefly talked about how hard it is to make and find criticism of modern Superman stuff because he exists in a culture war that's quick to place any nuanced criticism of his bright optimistic new media as "bitter snyderbro talking points". And I'm met with multiple Superman white knights who take it so personally that I'm critical of a fictional character they like. They moralize their love for Supes. Disliking Superman isn't an opinion someone can just have, it has to be secretly reflective of how bad you are as a person. If I say "Superman's boring sometimes" I get people making a big show of unfollowing me. That's the kind of loyalty to intellectual property money can't buy.

When you value a fictional character more than the real human artists behind them, you become this kind of fan. Remember when that Harley Quinn fart comic was announced? A bunch of comic fans on twitter decided to write a letter to DC comics protesting the title, spammed it everywhere while others harassed the woman writing that comic. Regardless of how bad a comic is, a fictional victim is never going to be more important than the real person writing them. But when you're obsessed with the dignity of these characters over the wellbeing of the artists behind them, this is normal behavior.

Cape media is such a bleak industry for comic artists. A character you created can be making billions as a blockbuster in the box office while you're still crowd funding for health care. Your contributions to Batman could be completely lost to history, uncredited, if it weren't for your son and granddaughter campaigning for that recognition. You're eternally a freelancer with no stability, and many of your peers die young. And it's a thankless job. Because most of your "fans" have that geek consumerism-as-an-identity mindset where they value Superman more than what you as an artist brought to him. The corporation doesn't respect its artists, and neither do the fans. The fact that you can experience this even when you make fan art -even when you don't work for the company- is proof of how pervasive this kind of culture is.

Today's meta thoughts came about from the fan discussion surrounding Peter David's (creator of Miguel O'Hara/Spiderman 2099 among many accomplishments) passing. His family still needs help recovering from medical debt of his long-term care. My Superman rambles tend to do well, so if I can help share his family's fundraiser even a bit, I'd be happy. No creator with this heavy an impact on the media landscape should be struggling financially.

Similarly! Share and support the Hero Initiative! They do great work with financially supporting aging comic creatives who have very little safety net due to the exploitative nature of the comics industry.

Calling out the cape comics industry isn't "attacking" your fictional fave. If you feel defensive whenever conversations about how exploitative this industry is come about, that's brand loyalty talking. The interior lives of these creatives shape the characters you love. Don't let them be forgotten.

[aggressiveguitarnoises]

hes having a therapy session with pot full of soup. the soup is a great listener

[manhattan-gamestop]

Is this anything

[essence-inked]

man if that isn't just a mood...

[internetgiraffekid1673]

I need all eah fans to know about Raven's rant on normalcy to Cedar in the third book:

Not only is this Raven spitting solid life advice and straight facts, it's funny as hell. I love Raven Queen. She is always the most exhausted person in the room and it leads to her being one of the funniest characters in the book.

[luciaintheskyainthi]

How would you fill out a ship chart based on Jason X Peter relationship?

It would be good to see their dynamic as a couple ;)

So I loved this prompt! Definitely didn't take me 5 minutes though! That's mostly down to me being dumb and not knowing how to work around this haha.

In hindsight, forgot to put the most obvious thing, which is 'slow burn' on this lmao. There's nothing happening between these two for a looooong time. Both writing wise, and time wise within the fic.

Enjoy!

[huginsmemory]

I feel like I just saw a post about it but seriously. Just working on my Billford aroace monsterfucking analysis. And. Just thinking bout how Bill originally was going to be a one off character. That he really wasnt at all going to be the big bad. And it's cause fans liked him so much. That the zodiac didn't mean anything. That Stanford as a character wasn't really fleshed out. Sure they knew he was going to be Stan's twin and the author but. They very much worked him backwards. Just the damn fact that Alex originally didn't really want to make a kids cartoon and was trying to make something too bizarre for Disney for them to be like nah to get a different job and they just kept saying yeah we like it. And then like... The impact it's had. Going fuckin' bananas over these characters that were only fleshed out late in the show. Over a character that nearly was a one off.

[essence-inked]

Actually, it's worse! The universe is going to get like insanely old, but even if you just take the 13.7 billion years that have already happened (and round that to 10 billion because fuck you, I'm allowed), if you live for a century, then you experience 1/100,000,000 - or one hundred millionth - of the show.

If we keep going with the show metaphor, most shows - plays, movies, concerts - are around three hours long, so let's go with that. 3*60*60 = 10,800 seconds, which we can again round to 10,000.

That means in all the time that's already happened, you get to see one ten thousandth of a second of the show.

But, okay, what if the greatest show is just a hominid thing? Hominids have been around for roughly four million years, and all the neat stuff like tool-making has been around for two million years and change. So, rounding that down to just one million years, if you live for a century, you'll have experienced one ten thousandth of the show. Or, in our three hour metaphor, you'll have experienced roughly one second.

You have just enough time to experience a burst of light and sound and the realization that Things Are Happening in that tiny, infinitesimal glimpse into the show, and then it's just... gone. And so are you, with all the knowledge and memory and love you've gained, because it may have been a second to the world, but it was everything to you. This is what haunts me late at night - that we all exist within a single breath of the world, and that no platitude can ever really make that stop being true.

But since I've dished out some existential dread, it's only fair for me to share the bit that gets me back up and moving, too.

It's NOT okay, and it COULD be better, and if I could have a thousand or ten thousand more years, I'd take them in a heartbeat. But the thing is, as it stands, we only get one second of the show, so we might as well make it count.

Do you know how much can happen in a second? Innumerable amounts of atoms collide, and lightning flashes in the sky, and you can say "I love you," if you say it really fast. We've had to make words for things that happen in a thousandth of a second, or a millionth, or a billionth, and we've even made it down to Planck time, which is so mind-bogglingly small that my brain breaks trying to imagine it.

And we're not alone, either. If a million people shout at the same time, even for just a second, it'll be audible for miles around. It destroys me inside that it's impossible to share everything we each experience with the rest of the world, but we can still share the bits that mean the most to us, and we can still pool our seconds to do something bigger than just ourselves. The most surefire way to make our second count is to not spend it entirely alone, and if that's all we get, then let's try to make it worth something.

And, hey, who knows? Maybe if we do a better job of working together, we'll be able to figure out how to get a bit more than just that one second someday.

i hate mortality what do you mean i was invited to the greatest show ever but only got 5 seconds admission. I need to see what happens next