“people in the JL hate Batman because he’s so strict” nah. people in the JL hate Batman because all of their sidekicks wanna hang out and train with the batfamily and come home asking questions like “so when are you going to get a plane?” and “why don’t you know how to do [complex judo move]?”

I feel like a lot of people don’t quite get what a butler is. The role tends to get rounded off to ‘male servant’ pretty regularly in some media, whereas actually butlers are typically not just servants but chief servants. The butler was generally in charge of either all male servants or just all servants, period, in the household of an aristocrat or other very wealthy person. This meant that butlers have often been fairly powerful and influential people, and sometimes even had a manservant or two of their own.

(Also, fun fact: Mary Roberts Rinehart, the early 20th century mystery writer who is widely credited with popularizing the whole ‘the butler did it’ trope was nearly murdered by one of her own servants, a chef whom she had passed over for promotion to butler. He came at her with a pistol, but it jammed, allowing her chauffeur time to wrestle it away and restrain him.)

this is a way better model... you'll still get transphobic & intersexist drs of course but i prefer this to male / female or even having separate questions for gender & sex.

[we can't see the full form, but i'd suggest having a "something else" option and dominant hormone question too.]

it's a fun hc of mine that during dick's robin days, he went through the "omg i wish i had a cool secret language so i can have secret conversations with my friends" phase all kids go through. but one of his closest friends at the time also happened to be the batman, a guy with possibly the most bizarrely diverse arsenal of skills in the world. bruce sees the merit in the entire idea of a coded language to communicate rudimentary information when they can hear but not see each other. so why not make a code built on bird vocalizations? it's pretty much incomprehensible to anyone without a trained ear or comprehensive knowledge of birding and impossible to even passably mimic without proper training, so while the chances of interception are high, the chances of someone understanding it enough to interrupt during the middle of a bird-convo and feed false information are not.

it also, batman and robin come to realize, feed into the "holy fuck our vigilantes are cryptids" idea. bird sounds that come from seemingly no determinable location (ventriloquism) come to mean batman and robin are nearby. to the goons of gotham, bird song becomes inextricably connected to getting your ass kicked by the dynamic duo. the real reason why criminals don't operate during the day is because they get skittish and jumpy about if the sounds of birds chirping are real birds or some masked vigilantes lying in wait to rock your shit, and it's just easier to commit crimes during the night when all the birds are asleep so you know for sure.

ornithologists have boards on their bedrooms dedicated to the bird-bats of gotham. they've written dissertations.

the bird language becomes a bit of a batfamily bonding connection. teaching each other how to do different clicks and whistles, making up slang so bruce and barbara can't complain of clogging up comms with non-mission relevant talk, searching up birds to associate them with different people, psychologically terrorizing the criminal populace of gotham by chirping at them...

how the bird code works is that there's a bird assigned to each one of gotham's major heavy hitter criminals and vigilantes, and a few assigned to heroes out of the city (by which i mean the ones the bats associate with often enough to have a sign to address by). the only birds i've got so far are the robin (for robin. self-explanatory) and the glistening-green tanager (for the joker). i only have one for the joker bc i wanted to reference this hc in one of my fics and so searched up green birds to find the most eye-searingly annoying-to-look-at green bird i could find, and the glistening-green tanager was the closest one to fit the bill.

"Who Is Superman? A Private Interview with Lois Lane" a fancomic about hope and connection. I've had this story in mind for so long and I'm very excited to be able to share it at last. Thank you for reading, and happy Lunar New Year!

Jeff Bezos's Amazon and Elon Musk's SpaceX are both fighting in court to have the National Labor Relations Board declared unconstitutional. Starbuck's and Trader Joe's joined them in separate lawsuits. All of these companies have a disgraceful history of worker abuse and union busting. All of them have been charged by the NLRB with hundreds of violations of workers’ organizing rights The NLRB is standing up to their union busting. That’s why they’re trying to destroy the NLRB. I'm going to do my best to keep you all informed about this case as it snakes its way through the courts. The future of unions may depend on the final verdict. http://dlvr.it/T49LM1

most of the talk on this website about Game Changer is how Sam Reich psychologically tortures his contestants, but I want to make it clear to the uninitiated that he's actually extremely ethical about it

He sends out a company wide email and asks them to choose episodes based on a chili pepper rating system

meaning he doesn't put 🌶️🌶️ people into 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ episodes

they're also big on consent ie cast and crew have to be okay with it before they'll do nudity or something like that in an episode

it's like the bdsm of psychological torture. safe, sane, and consensual.

the contestants know what they're getting into, and they're full down

Huge fan of when my speech patterns rub off on people enjoy when thay happens

Concept: A gender reveal party but AFTER the kid is born.

Like when the kid is 6 or 12 or 18 or 24. When the kid has decided what their gender is or isn’t.

An old and homely grandmother accidentally summons a demon. She mistakes him for her gothic-phase teenage grandson and takes care of him. The demon decides to stay at his new home.

more men should get hugs i dont think we as a society hug men enough

fathers casually dropping the craziest lore of their lives in the middle of a conversation

Brennan Lee Mulligan on Dimension 20 is a harsh but ultimately benevolent god, who subjects his players to harrowing trials which they curse him for in the moment, but later come to appreciate were for their benefit and enjoyment.

Sam Reich on Game Changer, on the other hand, is a cruel and capricious god who mocks and torments his players with games he has deviously designed to distress and enrage them, all for his own amusement and the attention of the masses.

Suddenly struck with a need to explain to you how boat pronouns work (I work in the marine industry).

When you're talking about the design of the boat, you say "it".

When the boat is still being built, your say "it".

When the boat is nearing completion, you can say "it" or "she".

When the boat is floating in the water you probably say "she", unless there is still a lot of work to be done (e.g. no engine yet) then you say "it".

When the boat is officially launched and operating, you say "she". If you continue to say "it" at this point you are not incorrect but suspiciously untraditional. You are not playing the game.

If you are referring to a boat you don't really know anything about you may say "it" ("there's a big boat, it's coming this way"). But if you know its name, it's probably "she" ("there's the Waverley, she's on her way to Greenock").

If you are talking about boats in general, you say "it" ("when a boat is hit by a wave it heels over")

If you speak about a boat in complimentary terms, it's "she" ("she's a grand boat"). If you are being disparaging it may be it, but not necessarily ("it's as ugly as sin", "she's a grotty old tub").

If she has a boy's name, she's still she. "Boy James", "King Edward", "Sir David Attenborough"? The pronoun is she.

If it's a dumb barge (no engine), you say it. But if it's a rowing boat (no engine), you say she.

I hope this has cleared things up so that you may not be in danger of misgendering floating objects.