#built like a gymnast

[grison-in-space]

this is why we call her the flip wizard

[junespriince]

Bruce literally became that mom that thinks she can still wear her teen daughter's clothes, like,,, he really did that.

[bigfan-fanfic]

Considering you only gain muscles by working out, and to work out, you need to lift heavy things, technically, Clark couldn't be muscular since he's way too strong to actually be able to train his muscles. Which means: Clark chubby farm boy is actually a possible and viable thing.

SO, fun fact! This is totally true, and in fact addressed often in comics.

It's usually agreed upon in canon that Clark didn't develop his powers right away, with his capacity for absorbing and utilizing solar energy gradually expanding, around the same time as the onset of puberty, probably around age 14. So though his powers' growths were rapid once they manifested, he did have some time to adjust until they reached their maximum. And it was during this time he was helping out on the farm, using that as a kind of informal training (lifting hay bales for strength, which progressed to lifting cattle to lifting tractors, etc.; practicing control and finesse with say, chickens and caring for livestock with super speed).

Remember, Clark is supposed to be potential for the high school football team in Smallville, and that immediately makes me think stocky and sturdy, not cut and visibly muscular. At the point where he's at the full strength he'll know as Superman, he's got pretty much no upper limit, and generally nothing that's going to help him train his muscles. So definitely, early career Superman is going to be more mass than muscle.

However, once he gets full access to the Fortress of Solitude and the support of the Justice League, he can get some assistance - Wonder Woman has incredible, divinely empowered strength, and as a warrior trains often - she helps instruct him in martial arts and can help him train at full strength. Meanwhile, Batman can help him train in environments built to limit his power, like red sun training rooms and such.

Considering his physiology is more dependent upon solar energy than anything else to build his strength and keep him healthy, I'd say solar energy keeps him from atrophying. But considering if he's got energy akin to photosynthesis from the sun, I'd suggest he never really gets much of a lean musculature and remains bulky and sturdy.

Above is Christopher Reeve both training and in costume as Superman - his muscles are well-formed, but his torso isn't like, eight pack abs and dehydrated - he's clearly building muscle mass and body fat in a healthy way, and it shows in his costume. He looks sturdy, and strong.

Above is golden age Superman next to a bodybuilder/powerlifter, which I think Superman's original design is supposed to evoke. He's not popping muscles through his suit, but he's clearly really fricking fit and strong. Even his waist is more close to the width of his chest than more narrow like you see in more contemporary illustrations.

My thought is that Clark's physique is a lot more like someone at the Highland Games. Built for strength and sturdiness. He doesn't have to keep lean because he's not worried about endurance and agility because he already has that from his powers. Big arms, broad chest, likely a little bit of a tummy. And if he's under layers like Clark usually dresses, he can easily be mistaken for pudgy instead of powerful.

In any case, that's my untrained viewpoint on the subject. Basically my sweet polite farmboy is basically a photosynthesizing plant with muscles. Wait, is that why Poison Ivy's pheromones can work on him???

[cheesydelphox]

i NEED buff lisanna to be canon

[itspileofgoodthings]

.

[l00k4tm4m45c415]

Barclay Stockett

[redwayfarers]

re the tags of my last reblog that i didn't wanna clog with my own blorbo thoughts, i desperately wish nika wasn't built like a ken doll in game... like sure, he's strong and has muscles but also has a soft belly and isn't all that ripped! he is wide and stocky and soft but also god forbid he punches or kicks you!

i have long since accepted that i'll never see my blorbos on screen the way i see them in my head but sometimes i wish the pixels would reflect the vision! it's genuinely weird to me to see him in some tits out/open front stuff and not see the stocky guy i see in my head... it's nothing a commission can't solve but i'm allowed to be annoying about my wol

[sethcoart]

I need your Catra’s workout routine

they probably do gymnastics so they're very flexible plus their muscles are slim but still strong

so i guess just start doing gymnastics my dude

[lottieurl]

ok i have mixed feelings. like i'd love this but it felt like it happened too fast?????? feels like i missed at least two episodes for this to be like. their course of action in the wilderness?

[doodlboy]

Did some figure studies 4 my current favorite fusions

[avid-idiot]

I feel like babies are oddly malleable

[pinkopaqued]

more content of kurt being strong. Lifting people

[inkskinned]

the thing about some men is that they want you to remember, at all times, that you are underneath them. that with one word or look or "joke", you will stay beneath them. that even "exceptions" to the rule are not true exceptions - the commonly cited statistic that one in eight men believe they could win against serena williams.

women's gymnastics is often not seen as real gymnastics. whatever the fuck non-euclidian horrors rhythmic gymnasts are capable of, it's often tamped down as being not a sport. some of the most dominant athletes in the world are women. nobody watches women's soccer. despite years of dancing and being built like a fucking brick, men always assume they're faster and stronger than i am. you wouldn't like what happens when they are incorrect. once while drunk at a guy's house i won a held-plank challenge by a solid minute. the party was over after that - he became exceedingly violent.

what i mean is that you can be perfect, and they still think you're ... lacking, somehow. i hope you understand i'm trying to express a neutral statement when i say: taylor swift was the possibly the most patriarchy-palatable, straight-down-the-line woman we could churn out. she is white, conventionally attractive, usually pretty mild in personality. say what you will about her (and you should, she's a billionaire, she can handle it), but a few things seem to be true about her: 1. she can write a damn catchy song, and 2. the eras tour truly was a massive commercial success and was also genuinely an impressive feat of human athleticism and performance.

i don't know if she deserves the title of "woman of the year," i'm not debating that in this post. what i am saying is that she was named Woman of The Year, and then an untalented man got onstage at the golden globes and made fun of her for attending her boyfriend's football games. what i am saying is that this woman altered local economies - and her dating life is still being made into a "harmless" punchline. the camera panned, greedy, over to her downing a full glass of champagne. congratulations taylor! you are woman of the year! but you are a woman. even her.

fuck, man. write better material.

a guy gets onstage at a college graduation and despite the fact like half the crowd is made up of women, he spends a significant proportion of it warning these people - who spent possibly hundreds of thousands of dollars on their education - that they were lied to. that the "real" meaning of femininity is motherhood. that they shouldn't rest on the laurels of that education-they-paid-for but instead throw it away to kneel at a man's heel. imagine that. sweating in your godawful polyester gown (that you also had to pay for!), fresh out of 4 years of pushing yourself ever-harder: and some guy you've never met - who knows nothing about you - he reminds you this "win" is a pyrrhic one at best. you really shouldn't consider yourself that extraordinary. you're still a woman, even after years of study.

god forbid you are not a pretty woman, but if you are pretty, you must be dumb. god forbid you are not ablebodied or white or cis or straight or good at swallowing. you must be beneath a man, or else they are not a man. the equation for masculinity seems to just be: that which is not a woman or womanly (god forbid). anything "feminine" is thereby anathema. to engage in "feminine" things such as therapy, getting a hug from a friend, or crying - it is giving up ones manhood. therefore women need to be put in their place to ensure that masculinity is protected.

this is something i have struggled to explain to terfs - they are not doing the work of feminism, but rather the patriarchy. by asserting that women and men must be (on some secret level) oppositional and in conflict, they also assume that being a woman is akin to being another species. but bigotry does not stem from observational truths or clarity - that is what makes it bigotry. there was nothing in my childhood that made me fundamentally different from my brother. we are treated differently nonetheless. to assert there is some biological drive that enforces my gender role is to assert that women have a gendered role. men do not see women as equal to them not because of biological reality - but instead because the core tenant of the patriarchy is that women aren't full, realized people.

we are told from a very young age to excuse misbehavior as a single man's choice - not all men. it is not all men, just that one guy. all women are gold-digging bitches who belong in the kitchen - but if a man is mean, bigoted, or violent to you, it's just that particular guy, and that means nothing about men-as-a-whole. it is only one guy who got mad when you gently rejected him. it is only one guy who warns her this trophy is heavy, are you sure you can hold it? it is only one guy who smashes her face into the cake. it is only one guy talking into a mic about hating our bodily autonomy.

i have just found that they often wait until the moment we actually seem to be upstaging them. you sit in a meeting where you're presenting your own findings and he says get me a coffee? or you run to the end of the marathon and are about to finish first and he pushes your kids out in front of you. you win the chess game and they make some comment akin to well, you're ugly away. we can be the billionaire and get the dream life and finally fucking do it and yet! still! they have this strange, visceral urge to say well actually, if you think you're so great -

it's not one just one guy. it's one in eight.

[phoneduk]

My Headcanon for the batfam heights:

Tallest:

Duke Thomas- that boy shot straight up and he is a half cm taller than Bruce, Bruce will never let him do an official height comparison tho.

Bruce - nobody in the family has seen him in recent year without shoes on though (whether it be slippers around the house or his armanis or his bat shoes) so nobody knows if he wears lifts or not

Jason - absolute tank only 1 cm shorter than Bruce and he maintains he would've been taller if he didn't die since it mustve stunted his growth

Dick - gymnast build, is secure in his height

Alfred - was taller than Dick but as he aged got more hunched and ended up shorter than Dick.

Damian - built like his father although shorter because ain't no way his grandfather (thomas) was tall

Steph - built like a runner,

Tim - HATES being the shortest and is extremely thankful he's taller than Cass

Cass - has never had a problem with her height bc everyone is too scared to make fun of her

[were-wolverine]

people acting like dick would struggle to pick up/carry jason as if he can’t easily lift a grown man with one hand

everyone talks about bruce working out so he can still pick up his kids (mainly jason bc he’s the tallest and bulkiest) but no one talks about how dick could very likely pick up and carry bruce with little to no strain. in fact, bro could probably carry bruce and jason (with some effort)

like dick is way stronger than people think, just because he’s built like a gymnast and not a body builder. bro once supported over a thousand fucking pounds of rubble in order to save people from a burning building !!

anyway just. ranting about dick grayson as always

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Netflix wants to chop down your family tree

Netflix has unveiled the details of its new anti-password-sharing policy, detailing a suite of complex gymnastics that customers will be expected to undergo if their living arrangements trigger Netflix’s automated enforcement mechanisms:

https://thestreamable.com/news/confirmed-netflix-unveils-first-details-of-new-anti-password-sharing-measures

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/02/nonbinary-families/#red-envelopes

Netflix says that its new policy allows members of the same “household” to share an account. This policy comes with an assumption: that there is a commonly understood, universal meaning of “household,” and that software can determine who is and is not a member of your household.

This is a very old corporate delusion in the world of technology. In the early 2000s, I spent years trying to bring some balance to an effort at DVB, whose digital television standards are used in most of the world (but not the USA) when they rolled out CPCM, a DRM system that was supposed to limit video-sharing to a single household.

Their term of art for this was the “authorized domain”: a software-defined family unit whose borders were privately negotiated by corporate executives from media companies, broadcasters, tech and consumer electronics companies in closed-door sessions all around the world, with no public minutes or proceedings.

https://onezero.medium.com/the-internet-heist-part-iii-8561f6d5a4dc

These guys (they were nearly all guys) were proud of how much “flexibility” they’d built into their definition of “household.” For example, if you owned a houseboat, or a luxury car with seatback displays, or a summer villa in another country, the Authorized Domain would be able to figure out how to get the video onto all those screens.

But what about other kinds of families? I suggested that one of our test cases should be a family based in Manila: where the dad travels to remote provinces to do agricultural labor; the daughter is a nanny in California; and the son is doing construction work in the UAE. This suggestion was roundly rejected as an “edge case.”

Of course, this isn’t an edge case. There are orders of magnitude more people whose family looks like this than there are people whose family owns a villa in another country. Owning a houseboat or a luxury car makes you an outlier. Having an itinerant agricultural breadwinner in your family does not.

But everyone who is in the room when a cartel draws up a standard definition of what constitutes a household is almost certainly drawn from a pool that is more likely to have a summer villa than a child doing domestic work or construction labor half a world away. These weirdos, so dissimilar from the global majority, get to define the boxes that computers will shove the rest of the world into. If your family doesn’t look like their family, that’s tough: “Computer says no.”

One day at a CPCM meeting, we got to talking about the problem of “content laundering” and how the way to prevent it would be to put limits on how often someone could leave a household and join another one. No one, they argued, would ever have to change households every week.

I put my hand up and said, “What about a child whose divorced parents share custody of her? She’s absolutely going to change households every week.” They thought about it for a moment, then the rep from a giant IT company that had recently been convicted of criminal antitrust violations said, “Oh, we can solve that: we’ll give her a toll-free number to call when she gets locked out of her account.”

That was the solution they went with. If you are a child coping with the dissolution of your parents’ marriage, you will have the obligation to call up a media company every month — or more often — and explain that Mummy and Daddy don’t love each other any more, but can I please have my TV back?

I never forgot that day. I even wrote a science fiction story about it called (what else?) “Authorized Domain”:

https://craphound.com/news/2011/10/31/authorised-domain/

I think everyone understood that this was an absurd “solution,” but they had already decided that they were going to complete the seemingly straightforward business of defining a category like “household” using software, and once that train left the station, nothing was going to stop it.

This is a recurring form of techno-hubris: the idea that baseline concepts like “family” have crisp definitions and that any exceptions are outliers that would never swallow the rule. It’s such a common misstep that there’s a whole enre* called “Falsehoods Programmers Believe About ______”:

https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood

In that list: names, time, currency, birthdays, timezones, email addresses, national borders, nations, biometrics, gender, language, alphabets, phone numbers, addresses, systems of measurement, and, of course, families. These categories are touchstones in our everyday life, and we think we know what they mean — but then we try to define them, and the list of exceptions spirals out into a hairy, fractal infinity.

Historically, these fuzzy categorical edges didn’t matter so much, because they were usually interpreted by humans using common sense. My grandfather was born “Avrom Doctorovitch” (or at least, that’s one way to transliterate his name, which was spelled in a different alphabet, but which was also transliterating his first name from yet another alphabet). When he came to Canada as a refugee, his surname was anglicized to “Doctorow.” Other cousins are “Doctorov,” “Doctoroff,” and “Doktorovitch.”

Naturally, his first name could have been “Abraham” or “Abe,” but his first employer (a fellow Eastern European emigre) decided that was too ethnic and in sincere effort to help him fit in, he called my grandfather “Bill.” When my grandfather attained citizenship, his papers read “Abraham William Doctorow.” He went by “Abe,” “Billy,” “Bill,” “William,” “Abraham” and “Avrom.”

Practically, it didn’t matter that variations on all of these appeared on various forms of ID, contracts, and paperwork. His reparations check from the German government had a different variation from the name on the papers he used to open his bank account, but the bank still let him deposit it.

All of my relatives from his generation have more than one name. Another grandfather of mine was born “Aleksander,” and called “Sasha” by friends, but had his name changed to “Seymour” when he got to Canada. His ID was also a mismatched grab-bag of variations on that theme.

None of this mattered to him, either. Airlines would sell him tickets and border guards would stamp his passport and rental agencies would let him drive away in cars despite the minor variations on all his ID.

But after 9/11, all that changed, for everyone who had blithely trundled along with semi-matching names across their official papers and database entries. Suddenly, it was “computer says no” everywhere you turned, unless everything matched perfectly. There was a global rush for legal name-changes after 9/11 — not because people changed their names, but because people needed to perform the bureaucratic ritual necessary to have the name they’d used all along be recognized in these new, brittle, ambiguity-incinerating machines.

For important categories, ambiguity is a feature, not a bug. The fact that you can write anything on an envelope (including a direction to deliver the letter to the granny flat over the garage, not the front door) means that we don’t have to define “address” — we can leave it usefully hairy around the edges.

Once the database schema is formalized, then “address” gets defined too — the number of lines it can have, the number of characters each line can have, the kinds of characters and even words (woe betide anyone who lives in Scunthorpe).

If you have a “real” address, a “real” name, a “real” date of birth, all of this might seem distant to you. These “edge” cases — seasonal agricultural workers, refugees with randomly assigned “English” names — are very far from your experience.

That’s true — for now (but not forever). The “Shitty Technology Adoption Curve” describes the process by which abusive technologies work their way up the privilege gradient. Every bad technological idea is first rolled out on poor people, refugees, prisoners, kids, mental patients and other people who can’t push back.

Their bodies are used to sand the rough edges and sharp corners off the technology, to normalize it so that it can climb up through the social ranks, imposed on people with more and more power and influence. 20 years ago, if you ate your dinner under an always-on #CCTV, it was because you were in a supermax prison. Today, it’s because you bought a premium home surveillance system from Google, Amazon or Apple.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/29/impunity-corrodes/#arise-ye-prisoners

The Netflix anti-sharing tools are designed for rich people. If you travel for business and stay in the kind of hotel where the TV has its own Netflix client that you can plug your username and password into, Netflix will give you a seven-day temporary code to use.

But for the most hardcore road-warriors, Netflix has thin gruel. Unless you connect to your home wifi network every 31 days and stream a show, Netflix will lock out your devices. Once blocked, you have to “contact Netflix” (laughs in Big Tech customer service).

Why is Netflix putting the screws to its customers? It’s part of the enshittification cycle, where platform companies first allocate surpluses to their customers, luring them in and using them as bait for business customers. Once they turn up, the companies reallocate surpluses to businesses, lavishing them with low commissions and lots of revenue opportunities. And once they’re locked in, the company starts to claw back the surpluses for itself.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

Remember when Netflix was in the business of mailing red envelopes full of DVDs around the country? That was allocating surpluses to users. The movie companies hated this, viewed it as theft — a proposition that was at least as valid as Netflix’s complaints about password sharing, but every pirate wants to be an admiral, and when Netflix did it to the studios, that was “progress,” but when you do it to Netflix, that’s theft.

Then, once Netflix had users locked in and migrated to the web (and later, apps), it shifted surpluses to studios, paying fat licensing fees to stream their movies and connect them to a huge audience.

Finally, once the studios were locked in, Netflix started to harvest the surplus for its shareholders: raising prices, lowering streaming rates, knocking off other studios’ best performing shows with in-house clones, etc. Users’ surpluses are also on the menu: the password “sharing” that let you define a household according to your family’s own idiosyncratic contours is unilaterally abolished in a quest to punish feckless Gen Z kids for buying avocado toast instead of their own Netflix subscriptions.

Netflix was able to ignore the studios’ outraged howls when it built a business by nonconsenually distributing their products in red envelopes. But now that Netflix has come for your family, don’t even think about giving Netfix some of what it gave to the MPAA.

As a technical matter, it’s not really that hard to modify Netflix’s app so that every stream you pull seems to come from your house, no matter where you are. But doing so would require reverse-engineering Netflix’s app, and that would violate Section 1201 of the DMCA, the CFAA, and eleventy-seven other horrible laws. Netflix’s lawyers would nuke you until the rubble bounced.

When Netflix was getting started, it could freely interoperate with the DVDs that the studios had put on the market. It could repurpose those DVDs in ways that the studios strenuously objected to. In other words, Netfix used adversarial interoperability (AKA Competitive Compatibility or ComCom) to launch its business:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability

Today, Netflix is on the vanguard of the war to abolish adversarial interop. They helped lead the charge to pervert W3C web-standards, creating a DRM video standard called EME that made it a crime to build a full-featured browser without getting permission from media companies and restricting its functionality to their specifications:

https://blog.samuelmaddock.com/posts/the-end-of-indie-web-browsers/

When they used adversarial interoperability to build a multi-billion-dollar global company using the movie studios’ products in ways the studios hated, that was progress. When you define “family” in ways that makes Netflix less money, that’s felony contempt of business model.

[Image ID: A Victorian family tree template populated by tintypes of old-timey people. In the foreground stands a menacing, chainsaw-wielding figure, his face obscured by a hoodie. The blade of the chainsaw is poised to chop down the family tree. A Netflix 'N' logo has been superimposed over the man's face.]