bomfunk mc's freestyler feminism
belgian ISP Telenet remade a music video straight from the top of my childhood. it's cool/inspiring/funny to see how things have changed.
superman (2025)
i saw superman yesterday. the plot is that lex luthor is up to no good.
(there will be uncensored spoilers throughout the rest of this thing.)
the film has a lot of funny movie logic, but basically does what it needs to do. i liked how perfunctorily the monsters of the week were treated, the excessive number of times superman stops what he's doing to stop something from falling on someone1, and lex luthor's technique of beating superman by micromanaging bizarro from a mission control center with a walkie talkie.
the movie's g-rated and almost completely bloodless.2 every time superman bodies someone, there's an obligatory chaser shot of the goon writhing around alively. the themes and characterization are accordingly light.3
afterwards, i was like "well, that was kind of bad but i also enjoyed myself"
but whence "that was kind of bad" ? were my expecations that this movie was going to be anything other than what it was? if i enjoyed myself, what's the actual problem?
i think it's that i actually have a secret fascination with the idea of superman, and am really curious about how other people run the thought experiment of "what would happen if one person had the ultimate monopoly on violence?" james gunn chose to write a dramatic story, not a polsci wargame, and so i was a little disappointed.
the superman movie i want to see is utilitarian superman hellbent on creating the conditions for global liberal democracy utopia.
some things he would do:
- throw all the nukes into the sun
- drop the worst guys into a volcano on live TV
- abduct all the world leaders and take them to an private island resort for 6 months where they have to microdose LSD and do team building exercises4
- launch a global journalism fund that creates multinational newsrooms around the world with a rigourous commitment to truth-finding, calling out corruption, and fostering a cooperative consensus of reality
- instruct all governments to implement a plan that will end all factory farming in 2 years
- create united nations v2, staffed by the recently reprogrammed world leaders, mandated to create a constitution that sets the rules for how superman can be democratically controlled from there on
and i think there are a tonne of ways you could complexify the plot for dramatic tension, if watching a rube goldberg machine isn't your thing:
- the slippery slope from superman smashing the killer drone factory in ukraine to intervening in light border skirmishes between india and pakistan to zipping around the philippine sea to search every fishing ship for weapons.
- the supermedia organization criticizing superman the most vocally, testing his commitment to the ideal of free speech
- arguments from citizens that authoritarianism is bad, no matter how benevolent it is (though this is a cliché found in every gritty comic book)
- moral leadership not filtering down into each country's institutions i.e. the CIA rejecting its proselyte president, and each tier of the state needing its own session at Camp PLUR
- phycisists and economists insisting he simply becomes a transitional power source
if you wanted to be extra cynical5, you could have the movie show superman's transformation from ambitious idealist to the very veidt-style existential threat that humanity unites to defeat, but i think i'd prefer the version where, despite some bumps and unintended consequences along the way, things mostly work out, and the world reaches a stable form of peace and prosperity.
i think that's the more subversive choice: taking superman's incorruptibility seriously and exploring what world peace might actually look like. to ask what if the real conflict isn't "will superman become evil" but "can humanity be forced to be free?"
that would be the real punk rock thing to do.6
rolling physical dice for no purpose is fun
i'm talking that toy block, developing sense of agency shit.
i challenge you to roll three sixes for no reason.
memory
In 2019, a large chandelier was installed underneath Granville Street Bridge, to aesthetically enhance the area. It was controversial at the time - a symbol of what's wrong with luxury condo development.1
I used to work near Granville Island, so when I visited Vancouver in early 2025, I wanted to walk around my old stomping grounds and pay the chandelier a visit.
I walked to where I remembered it being installed, and discovered it had been removed, presumably for maintenance reasons. Disappointed, I went home and lamented to my sister.
She replied, "Oh, it's not there anymore? By the north entrance?"
"By the south, you mean. And no, there's nothing."
"It was never at the south entrance. It was installed at the north entrance."
"What are you talking about?"
I argued with my sister - who lives in Vancouver and has been to Granville Island countless times in the last 6 years - that she was wrong. I had seen that chandelier many times while working near the south entrance.
After 10 minutes, she was unconvinced but sympathetic, and so we took to the internet, where every single article, blog, photo, or video we could find confirmed that the chandelier was installed and had-only-ever-been-located at the north entrance.
I felt mad. Both ways. This was a conspiracy. I was so sure that I had seen the chandelier at the south entrance, and that this was all some horrible kind of gaslighting.
But after scouring through every obscure source of evidence I could think of, I had nothing to back me up.
Finally, reluctant and unhappy, I quietened.
I went to the north entrance a few days later. The chandelier was there. I looked around. I had no memory of this part of the island.
Months have passed. I'm pretty sure what happened is that the ceiling of the bridge looks the same from both entrances, and I saw so many photos of the chandelier in the news with the familiar ceiling of the bridge behind it that I assumed they must have been taken from the place I knew where the ceiling looked like that.
So now I have direct evidence to the contrary, and a plausible story as to how I got so confused in the first place. I no longer believe the chandelier was ever installed near the south entrance. And yet.
I still have the memory of walking past it during my lunch break.
related reading
smerching
smerching is when you're looking for an emoji.
usually we smerch because we can't remember which drawer the emoji we're looking for is stored in (is 💦 nature or human?), but sometimes also because we're not quite sure which pictogram best conveys the tone of what we're trying to express, and even less frequently because the emoji picker we're using isn't on the latest unicode version and isn't showing 🫨 even though we swear we've looked everywhere.
business idea
"museum of thirst"
ostensibly an exhibit about the history of water and plumbing. it takes an hour to walk through. there are salted snacks at the start. heaters are turned up high. there are water fountains and vending machines throughout, but they're all out of order. there's a stationary bike that powers a water pump, but no matter how hard you pedal you're always just a bit short of getting water. thirst-generating pictures everywhere of sweating glasses of icy water, etc.
let me level with ya
Tul, the fearsome barbarian, pursues the duke down one of the castle’s corridors. Elsie, his gnomish wizard companion trails behind, holding her velvet hat in place with one hand and a crumpled scrollbook with the other. Slam! The duke locks the door behind him, and his footsteps disappear up the tower. Roaring, Tul crashes his shoulder into the door, but he rolled a 2, so the door doesn’t budge. When Elsie catches up, she rolls a 20, and the door bursts open. The duke can’t have gotten far!
i wish this existed
a magic the gathering engine + evolution algorithm to develop and playtest duel decks that were perfectly balanced, variable, and fun.
i don't want to spend my time reading through all the cards and playtesting with myself before printing some new decks to play with my friends, and i don't want to use online decklists because they're typically too competitive (filled with 4x of the best cards) and repetitive to play.
sneaky spiritual covers
my library on shuffle has elicited some eye-widenings in me recently. tracks where the lineage is so obvious that it's… surprising they even changed the title. a sneaky spiritual cover.
KIND WORDS by Gretchen is one, of Horizontal Hold by This Heat. Everyone in that Calgary scene was obviously, famously inspired by This Heat but I hadn't heard these two songs back-to-back before to realize how direct it got. thanks shuffle.
simulation fibrosis
I was listening to a podcast the other night where one of the hosts complimented Tim Urban on his knack for defining conceptual structures that help clarify a confused subject. Unfortunately, the given example was Tim adding Up-Down to the Left-Right political spectrum, where "up" is being educated and rational, and "down" is being primitive and emotional.
As far as poltical compass memes go... pretty bad.1
Still. Love a good model.