#which also don't work nearly as well

[yarnings]

Look, I'm talking about diaper changes here. Specifically about factors that make them unpleasant. (Yes, we all know that the answer is "using disposables", but I'm being more specific.) You may well want to scroll past.

I will preface this by saying that yes, I know that commenting on public stuff on Facebook is a horrible idea, but sometimes the stupid is just too strong. The number of parents who think that changing cloth diapers is grosser than changing disposable ones was impossible to ignore. (If you are washing your own I will entertain the argument that you find having to deal with the disposable diaper garbage less gross than the diaper laundry, yes.)

But what gets me is that there are apparently large numbers of parents who not only don't dump diapers into the toilet (confession time: I've pretty much never done that, because when the change table in the airport washroom is located poorly, that's just not happening), they are unaware that that's what you're supposed to do. Not just "wait, you're supposed to do what?" but "that's stupid, why would anyone do that?". And yes, the follow-up wasn't "why would someone go to that much bother" but "why would they tell you to do it"

Can we maybe, as a society, agree that keeping biohazards out of the dump is a good thing?

[makiswirl]

can i just say. and this is probably a niche hill to die on. that i am so gobsmacked every time someone vaguely hints at the idea that jotaro doesn't care meaningfully for the other crusaders, usually particularly kakyoin and joseph, when those two actually tend to be the ones he reacts to being hurt the hardest

like he cares for his loved ones!!!! that literally plays into his character motives in every single part he shows up in!!! stop lying to me!!!!!!!

[mariocki]

Shadows of Fear: Come Into My Parlour (1.10, Thames, 1971)

"A tube ticket?"

"Not a ticket. The ticket."

"Which one?"

"The one that should have been in my pocket."

"Was that your crime? Everybody's done that, some time in their life..."

"Not everybody gets caught."

"It's nothing."

"The most important thing that ever happened to me."

[rmbunnie]

I know Morrison's Batman tends to be considered one of the greats, and I am definitely warming up to it more than I did on my initial read, but there are still some elements of it I found really didn't mesh with me. I feel like I can say this a lot more concisely than I did during my initial readthrough of Batman and Robin 2009, plus I've had more time to reflect and actually form a coherent opinion that wasn't a gut reaction, and keep in mind that I've read Batman and Robin in a vacuum Morrison-wise and can't speak on it in the larger context of their Batman run, but aside from just. very odd writing of certain characters, I feel like one of the more significant things that rubbed me the wrong way with this storyline was that a lot of the "weirdness" I'd seen hyped up felt either inconsistent enough that it didn't have a significant presence for me, especially towards the end of the run, or very surface-level.

One of the runs I see hyped up as some of Morrison's greatest work is Animal Man, especially for its metafictional ending. I haven't gotten around to reading it yet, but I expect that I'll enjoy it, or find it very interesting at the least (although author-inserts can come across a bit arrogant sometimes imo.) The point is I've heard good things, that it comes down to a very interesting and one-of-a-kind conflict in the end, which made me in some part hopeful for similar with Batman and Robin, (although I do have to admit I was reading it in part to see how off his Jason really could be.) I didn't really find that, tbh. There definitely were genuinely weird plot points with impact on the story which I feel were really successful, unfortunately it seems like a lot of them were at the cost of any prior characterization for the characters involved. Damian has steel implanted into his spine which allowed Deathstroke to control his movements and set off his emotional connection with Dick, Talia just had to be written horribly for it to happen. Sasha is a really interesting parallel to Damian/Robin-in-general. The conflict around her grotesque mask permanently fused onto her face and the fear that it'll kill her completely to take it off, the scene in which she gets said mask in the first place/the dollotrons, and the concept of a villain getting their own Robin in someone completely unrelated to Batman and the impact their legacy has had is all really original and cool, it's just that it's all dependent on a bewildering version of Jason that directly contradicts all previous characterization save BftC. To me the tradeoff doesn't feel necessary, but the events are inventive and have weight in the larger story.

In other areas though, especially as the run wrapped up, the zaniness that I see hyped up a lot, while providing a unique atmosphere, felt a lot like set dressing more than anything. In retrospect, the first time I really noticed this was the Professor Pyg dance page back in issue 2 or 3, I believe? But it became much more frequent towards the end of the series. The entire city becomes infected with a viral drug by Professor Pyg which isn't a major threat and doesn't serve anything in the story much besides being wacky, letting Professor Pyg say odd things about his mother sometimes and putting Commissioner Gordon... in a dress! Zany! (Professor Pyg is eventually... presumably?... torn apart by a parade of dollotrons and his narrative importance dies with him.) Alongside the Morrison-original villains like Dr. Hurt and Professor Pyg, there's a mysterious new player in town who's been orchestrating everything, and after a dozen issues of mystery it's the Joker, but wearing a mask and making edgy "differently-abled" jokes!

Dr. Hurt is interesting, and I liked his part of the story if I ignored the panels of auxiliary weirdness thrown on to add to the vibe, and I think there's something fun and interesting there about the legacy of Batman vs. artistic interpretations with his motive of ruining the Wayne's legacy (made more apparent with his talk about the Batcave being "the way it was meant to be in his head," the manor and Batcave "his to ruin," but Dr. Hurt kind of fades out of the story as Batman returns and is defeated by Joker, laying a banana peel on the ground. In the context of the theme of artistic interpretation and Morrison's commentary that they never cared to pretend the story was going to end with anything but a return to the classic Batman, I actually find this really interesting. A character heavily defined and reinvented by Morrison's writing being defeated by one of the most iconic Batman characters with a classic comedy trick from the 19th century feels like the conclusion to the contrast between Batman's legacy and the artistic license of the authors writing the comics: you can have your personalized elements, but the legacy of Batman is elastic and unlikely to be molded by them: certainly it won't be destroyed. Despite this, it didn't change the exhaustion of seeing the Gravedigger's mask come off and settling in for another comic where the Joker is gonna be doing classic zany Joker stuff.

As much as I'm frustrated with the way Talia and Jason are written during this run, I didn't entirely hate it, and the more I think about it, the more I find things I like. Some of my frustrations come down to taste, and are an unavoidable product of my personal taste differing from a pro comic author who had an established writing career while I was going to elementary school. I feel like some previous Batman comics were referenced in really exciting ways, for example the combination of Bruce's absence, a drug being used to gain control over citizens, an odd demonic presence, an imposter cult leader (If you can call Dr. Hurt that) prolonging his life through magical rituals, the background detail of complete chaos in the city, and one of the main villains being torn apart by a crowd of his followers, from the limited number of straight-up-Batman storylines I've read, felt pretty strongly like a nod to The Cult. But even considering the commentary on creative license vs. the consistency of Batman as a pop culture icon, the feeling of reading the comic was frequently that I was being convinced of a weirdness that didn't extend through the story down to the actual structure or plot points of the issue I was reading (with exceptions, such as the Sasha + Professor Pyg thing,) and although I appreciate the message of the return to status quo in the ending, with the hype of the story's inventiveness and uniqueness on my mind, it was kinda disappointing to realize halfway through that for all the weird window dressing, the story would be commiting to a much more traditional turn than what I was expecting.

[piratebay]

my therapist asking if i'd tried anything other than meds drugs and/or alcohol to sleep before. like bruh. the list is long. the nighttime ritual i had as a child worked most of the time but since then nothing really has been that effective. also probably because i haven't been able to form any routine on my own without outside reinforcement. ever. much less one that works in the long term. :smiles beautifully:

[emmavakarian-theirin]

god the amount of art i would pump out if i stopped letting lineart talk me out of it i would be unstoppable

[diseaseriddencube]

THE AKUDAMA DRIVE STAGE PLAY IS NOW AVAILABLE!!!!!

[izzy-b-hands]

Got all excited last night bc i saw a post from a mod on the gta o subreddit abt the Halloween update being set to drop today around 5 AM (backed up by at least two gaming websites that had stories also stating the same start time and date)

Went in today ready for Halloween and uh. Nothing lol

Checked the actual Rockstar website and there's no mention of it, just that RDR o is getting a Halloween update this week

If i was a betting man I'd start a pool on how late in the month it'll be by the time the gta Halloween drops lmao

(also a pool on how likely it is the mod is lying; as they continue to insist they have access to all the usual Halloween stuff in GTA o today and that everyone who doesn't must not know how to restart their game to see if that changes anything, or maybe they didn't click play on GTA but a different game in their library? Which is insulting af, especially to the guy with the flare that shows he's at a level so high in the game that i frankly didn't know existed, who called them out and asked if maybe they didn't get confused and thought gta and rdr were both getting the update at the same time. Person was nice abt it, just asked plainly and said it was ok if that was the case, but that it would be helpful for others to know. poor dude immediately got piled on by the mod for it but like. he's right lmao. if that's the case it's fine! mistakes happen! but stop insisting you have access to something seemingly no one else trying to play online does!)

[thethingything]

also shoutout to the hospital for sending us a bunch of PDFs with information about preparing for surgery and what to expect, except the information was all generic stuff where most of it does't actually apply to wisdom tooth removal, so I had a huge panic attack where I nearly threw up because a bunch of the stuff mentioned in there is extremely triggering for us, only to then find out that stuff literally doesn't apply anyway, but now I feel like I have even less of an idea of what to actually expect because it's so hard to figure out which information does apply

[otsukare-katsukare]

it's craaazy crazy for me to hear about people sorting fics by kudos in descending order or filtering out anything below 50k words or anything else that vastly slims down your selection cause i have been in a fandom now for nearly a year that has, for my character of choice, a grand total of 1200 fics that have been written over the course of a decade. i have at least clicked on every single one that he plays more than a bit part in, and i bet i've reread like half of them. some people donj't know they're fucking born i swear

[tuesziday]

My mother is threatening to put the house up for sale (again) and it's happened so many times that I can't tell if she's actually going through with it or not

[nexus-nebulae]

whyyyyyy am i waking up with heartburn the only snack i had before bed this time was a GRANOLA BAR

[perihel1on]

according to Doctor Google it is possible to bruise just from overexerting a muscle, tho almost every result mentions an "extreme workout" of some sort

meanwhile i just went from being very sedentary to standing/walking 35ish hours a week (customer service job) and yesterday noticed a band of bruising on both upper-mid thighs. i was like huh i must have banged them against something and not noticed. well today the bruising has spread up and around the side, on both legs it's an area around the size of my hand that looks lightly bruised. like... should i be concerned about this?? the fuck😭

[ourceliumnetwork]

y'know that post that's like everyone's got their special super power or whatever, it might just look a little different from the super hero movies? right?

yeah my bio family's version of that is Impeccably Bad Timing

[vaspider]

While I'm writing things that I've been intending to write for a while... one of the things that I think that a lot of people who haven't been involved in like... banking or corporate shenaniganry miss about why our economy is its current flavor of total fuckery is the concept of "fiduciary duty to shareholders."

"Why does every corporation pursue endless growth?" Fiduciary duty to shareholders.

"Why do corporations treat workers the way they do?" Fiduciary duty to shareholders.

"Why do corporations make such bass-ackwards decisions about what's 'good for' the company?" Fiduciary duty to shareholders.

The legal purpose of a corporation with shareholders -- its only true purpose -- is the generation of revenue/returns for shareholders. Period. That's it. Anything else it does is secondary to that. Sustainability of business, treatment of workers, sustainability and quality of product, those things are functionally and legally second to generating revenue for shareholders. Again, period, end of story. There is no other function of a corporation, and all of its extensive legal privileges exist to allow it to do that.

"But Spider," you might say, "that sounds like corporations only exist in current business in order to extract as much money and value as possible from the people actually doing the work and transfer it up to the people who aren't actually doing the work!"

Yes. You are correct. Thank you for coming with me to that realization. You are incredibly smart and also attractive.

You might also say, "but Spider, is this a legal obligation? Could those running a company be held legally responsible for failing their obligations if they prioritize sustainability or quality of product or care of workers above returns for shareholders?"

Yes! They absolutely can! Isn't that terrifying? Also you look great today, you're terribly clever for thinking about these things. The board and officers of a corporation can be held legally responsible to varying degrees for failing to maximize shareholder value.

And that, my friends, is why corporations do things that don't seem to make any fucking sense, and why 'continuous growth' is valued above literally anything else: because it fucking has to be.

If you're thinking that this doesn't sound like a sustainable economic model, you're not alone. People who are much smarter than both of us, and probably nearly as attractive, have written a proposal for how to change corporate law in order to create a more sensible and sustainable economy. This is one of several proposals, and while I don't agree with all of this stuff, I think that reading it will really help people as a springboard to understanding exactly why our economy is as fucked up as it is, and why just saying 'well then don't pursue eternal growth' isn't going to work -- because right now it legally can't. We'd need to change -- and we can change -- the laws around corporate governance.

This concept of 'shareholder primacy' and the fiduciary duty to shareholders is one I had to learn when I was getting my securities licenses, and every time I see people confusedly asking why corporations try to grow grow grow in a way that only makes sense if you're a tumor, I sigh and think, 'yeah, fiduciary duty to shareholders.'

(And this is why Emet and I have refused to seek investors for NK -- we might become beholden to make decisions which maximize investor return, and that would get in the way of being able to fully support our people and our values and say the things we started this company to say.)

Anyway, you should read up on these concepts if you're not familiar. It's pretty eye-opening.

[rival-the-rose]

I have. So much bitching to do