Shocking Revelations and Epiphanies

[Thad]

[nosimpleway]

Cecil Harvey, Dark Knight and captain of Baron's elite military force, the Detroit Bears...

[François]

Oof, I guess.

Oh hey, uh, follow-up. First off, sorry I didn't respond for so long, I kinda fell into a self-doubt spiral for the last... month. As it goes. I hope I did not worry anyone.

I reached the conclusion that I've been using effective and healthy coping strategies for so long that I forgot the extent to which I need those strategies in the first place. And, well, that extent is considerable, to say the least. I guess I lost sight of it all for a while, or just inadvertently reduced my awareness of it, and it caught me off guard. Either way it all seems to balance out enough that I can keep on keeping on, as long as I remember to pay proper attention to myself. I'm not in Any Kind Of Danger. I promise.

I think a turning point came when I learned that my two year old niece asks every day where I am, and when I'm going to visit again, and when I'm going to wake up. I've kind of arranged my whole life so that the only person who has to suffer from my ailment is myself. Knowing that a tiny child misses me both on account of hypersomnia and the pandemic got me in a way that frankly I didn't know I could be got.

I suppose life just had to remind me that the Reason of Musubi is a bad idea from the ground up.

So yeah. It just varies from person to person. You, luckily, seem to be the type that handles isolation fine. It doesn't mean you're damaged, please don't think that.

This means a lot, and reading it helped a lot. Thank you.

[Mongrel]

Knowing that a tiny child misses me both on account of hypersomnia and the pandemic got me in a way that frankly I didn't know I could be got.

I feel ya.

Not being able to go to school and see the kids for a year now has really destroyed a lot of mental health progress I'd made in the preceding years. Due to lockdown measures and trying to stay home as much as possible, I don't even run into them or their parents randomly in the neighbourhood like I used to.

You better hug the stuffing outta that little girl when you can again.

EDIT: So does your niece think of you as some kind of bear-man who must hibernate? That sounds entirely too Canadian. And adorable. Like I am picturing this as a kids book right now Mon Oncle François.

"Mon oncle François n'est pas comme les autres oncles."
"Mon oncle François est un ours."
[colourful flat-watercolour of a bear wearing pants and a touque]

[François]

Oh, I don't think she's at a point where she understands that I have some ailment, or that bears hibernate. At least that wasn't the case last time I saw her. It's a lot of "i est où Anwa?" and "Anwa dodo?"

What sucks more is that I'm the only one in my extended family who's actually an isolation hardliner, so she sees everyone else at least a couple times a month, and I have to assume she's figured there's something different with me specifically. I just hope she doesn't end up thinking I don't want to see her.

[Friday]

She won't. Just make sure to play with her a lot next time you do.

[Blossom]

videochat maybe

[François]

I don't have a camera. No smartphone, no laptop, not much money at all. We did "talk" on the regular old phone on a few occasions, but it doesn't seem to occur to her to even attempt to say anything back to me, and I'm not much of a speaker myself at the best of times, so while it's better than nothing, the experience leaves something to be desired.

There will be catching up at some point though yeah, that's for sure.

[Mongrel]

It's a lot of "i est où Anwa?" and "Anwa dodo?"

I know it hurts, but oh em eff gee this is adorbs.

That's a pretty young age for a non-parent/sibling who's not usually present to loom so large in a kid's head. You must be a pretty awesome uncle, because that's a little girl who really loves you.

[beatbandito]

I'm not much of a speaker myself at the best of times, so while it's better than nothing, the experience leaves something to be desired.

When I was visiting my sister a while back, we were out with her married friends and their ~8yo daughter for lunch. At one point both the parents get up to some kind of self-serve station and my sister goes with them. Me and the kid sit in pretty much complete awkward silence the entire time.

After my sister was like "yeah, they wanted to do that because they were saying she's too shy and I was like 'oh yeah [beatbandito] too, let me go with you.'"

[Friday]

I have a cheat code for talking to kids if you can't think of anything to say:

Just ask them what their favorite _______ is. No matter what you put in that blank, they will say something and then you can follow up, or just ask what their next favorite is.

[Niku]

[Büge]

what a shocking revelation that the uploader has made that video unavailable in Canada

[Niku]

lorne michaels didn't waste your best and brightest just to give you free entertainment in return

[Thad]

what a shocking revelation that the uploader has made that video unavailable in Canada

I'm seeing "unavailable in your country" and I'm in the US.

I think.

I guess I haven't checked the news today.

[Thad]

I was talking to somebody the other day about Steve Ditko's politics, as you do.

He said that Ditko's belief in classical heroes who do the right thing for its own sake doesn't make any sense in the context of his objectivism; that objectivists hold that people rescued by heroes are parasites who have failed to stand on their own.

I responded that I think Ditko would argue that fighting crime is in a hero's rational self-interest. Because if you don't stop crime, you could become a victim of crime yourseloh holy shit that's literally Spider-Man's origin story.

(Spider-Man's origin story also has another of Ditko's favorite tropes, the slippery slope. A guy who's merely a thief at the beginning of the story becomes a murderer by the end. That's pretty much the message of every Mr. A story: gray becomes black; small crimes lead to bigger ones; anyone who commits a petty crime in a Mr. A story becomes a murderer by the end.)

On further reflection, I don't think Ditko did that on purpose; I don't think his view was really that heroes should only fight villains out of rational self-interest. He held contempt for the notion that individuals owe anything to abstractions like community or society, but he believed man, as a rational animal, owed something to abstract ideals like justice (which he defined, I assume quoting Ayn Rand, as "recognizing a thing for what it is and treating it accordingly"). He believed heroes should fight villains simply as a matter of principle; the guilty must be punished because they're guilty. No other reason is needed.

It's also interesting to consider that Ditko believed in foreign military interventions. Ayn Rand vociferously opposed the Vietnam War; Ditko was one of those guys who lamented, to his dying day, that we chickened out instead of finishing the job. (Though I assume he probably opposed the draft.)

[Mongrel]

Technically, 'duck tape' really is the correct name, because the original versions (including pre-self-adhesive varieties) were made from cotton duck (a tightly woven canvas).

Which gets ITS name from the dutch word for linen canvas. So nothing in this chain has anything to do with ducks at all. But it's still ducks all the way down.

[Mongrel]

The entire senior command staff of the original Enterprise was Scottish (or maybe Scots-Irish), even Spock.

Kirk
Grayson
McCoy
Scott

[Büge]

[Thad]

I saw somebody mention The Devil's Dictionary and I remembered I have this Classics Illustrated adaptation my dad bought on a whim when he took me to the comic store when I was a kid. I pulled up the cover



and was like holy shit, that's Gahan Wilson.

I'd say "How did I never notice that before?" but I can think of some reasons I wouldn't have recognized a prolific Playboy cartoonist when I was 7.

I always assumed Dad just bought it because he's a big Ambrose Bierce fan, but in hindsight he probably recognized Wilson's art too. I can't say for sure and I'm sure he wouldn't remember if I asked him about it.