This is another occasion where I really hope the lesson isn’t “Female leads don’t sell”. Probably an obvious observation, but Captain Marvel always struck me as a boring, flawless, invincible hero without much personality.
this is so interesting, we were just talking marvel today with my best friend and she pointed out captain marvel as one of her favorite mcu characters. and it’s specifically because she’s a strong female character who’s allowed to be strong without being hyper-competent or incredibly cerebral or anything like that. she’s just a woman who stands up for things and punches shit occasionally and is allowed to win through sheer brute force.
and yes, she’s way too powerful in many of the same way as superman, which is a narrative defect, but i find it extremely hypocritical how much more scrutiny people point toward captain marvel on that, while superman continues to be one of dc’s most popular heroes, despite marvel using her better than dc uses superman.
It’s new to me that Superman evades that criticism. There’s a reason Batman gets so much more media than him lately, in large part because of the “What if Batman is actually bad for Gotham” philosophical junk.
Even the Zack Snyder films, for all their flaws, examine the two-toned mistakes of the hero more than the power, eg “Maybe a god X-raying us at every occasion and destroying buildings to fight his rival is perhaps too oppressive” versus “Maybe he should’ve used his X-ray vision to see the bomb in that guy’s wheelchair before he set it off.”
he doesn’t evade that criticism, but there aren’t constant “scandals” around him regarding that. half the time you hear about captain marvel, it’s someone criticizing her for being too powerful (sometimes with accusations of “wokeism” thrown in, but not always). nearly all the time you hear about superman, he’s just there, it’s a regular positive-ish portrayal you’d normally see around any character, with a bit of critique thrown in of course. that’s the difference in scrutiny i’m talking about, the internet doesn’t tend to blow up every time they make a superman movie the same way it blew up for captain marvel because god forbid we see a woman in the same position as supes.
(also, i suppose many of her critics were the same people who criticize stuff like female thor or black captain america by saying go make original heroes – this is the treatment you get when you comply. underprivileged groups always get higher scrutiny, and it easily propagates to otherwise well-meaning people too.)
yeah, an important clarification on that is i base my superhero stuff entirely on movies. i made a genuine effort to get into the comics but i just couldn’t – it might just be my luck but i’ve literally only read either canon or good stories from marvel and dc, nothing i tried managed to hit both. but for what it’s worth, i presume the majority of people are the same way, comics just don’t have the same degree of mainstream cultural penetration that movies enjoy.
i do agree with you though, clark is far more interesting than superman. i used to be an ardent superman hater specifically because the movie portrayals sucked and most online fans i interacted with were like “my fictional character could totally beat your fictional character” but i do really enjoy very human stories about the dude. and hell, sometimes his powered stuff can also be kinda cool – but the same applies to captain marvel as well and that’s usually the part that people don’t like to accept.
Yep! I’m not a big fan of any of the modern Superman films, I think there’s way too much punching and not enough super-human feats. And by that I mean rescuing people, or performing “miracles” that only he can in order to help the greater good.
Clark will let a monster punch him in the face dozens of times if he thinks he can save both the people and the creature’s life. That’s what creates dilemmas for me when I enjoy a decent Superman story, an ethical dilemma that can’t be solved by hitting something as hard as possible.
The cool thing about Superman isn’t that he has these fantastic powers, but that the person who wields them will always try to do the right thing, because they know nobody else can.
The original Superman movie nailed that aspect. Clark was confident and maybe even a little cocky because of his abilities… but when his father suffered a heart attack, all the super strength in the universe couldn’t save him.
You are 100% correct in that a lot of superhero discourse online seems to aaaaaaaalways come down to “who would win in a fight”, which has always baffled me, because comic books are LOADED with ethical and moral plays which are suppose to make us question whether violence is even a good answer for anything in the first place.
It’s about using your own strengths to help facilitate the weakness of those who can’t help themselves.
The Superman problem. Main sources of conflict tend to involve depowering, fighting another godlike, or threatening people they care about. Over and over again.
The problem is that even Superman deconstructions get shat on. Snyder tried to do something different but everyone wanted a hokey silver age comic supes
Snyder's films were crap tho, and he didn't understand the characters - you can't deconstruct Superman and Batman if you don't understand Superman and Batman. Plus the lighting and pacing were awful. That's why they got shat on
Actually makes me appreciate so much more that one set of writers managed to make a semi-compelling show that focuses on Lois, including her personal growth, all while discovering that her plucky goodboy intern is in fact the man of steel. (Referring to My Adventures with Superman in case it’s not obvious)
One of the things a reviewer highlighted as very important to that show was that it didn’t praise Lois’ rebelliousness and spunk as having no consequences. I basically just didn’t see any of that journey in the first Captain Marvel movie.
You may not realize it, but unless we’re talking processors Apple almost always puts old tech in their devices.
Their laptops still sell with 8gb of slow RAM, and tiny hard drives. This is an upsell tactic so you pay them extortionate amounts for cheap upgrades. Then their computers… Oh man, just don’t. They sell a stand that’s $1,000, do we even need to go into the rest?
Even their phones STILL lack the latest features of their competitors. Though most competitors have vastly given up dramatic innovations. Check out the cameras, the screen refresh rates, the RAM, the screen brightness, and side-by-side user comparison testing of their poorly performing GPU’s.
I’m not laughing… I find the whole thing kind of depressing. Real talk, though… I’m just as pissed off at Google and many other huge companies.
I’m tired of huge companies exploiting the ignorance of average folks and damaging the progression of consumer technology. We deserve better than this.
If Apple sold their products for a pittence, I’d be their absolute biggest fan. They not only push aggressively overpriced tech, but they convince impressionable people to buy into their “ecosystem”.
What the heck is that, even? What is their “ecosystem”? Macs, iPads and iphones all work with windows and Linux. Heck, Mac IS Linux at a core level. I’ll tell you what it is… George Carlin give me strength, because “it’s all bullshit, and it’s BAD for you.”
Nope! Not even that. Just an agreement between the scam arti- sorry, seller and the dumbfuc- sorry, buyer, that the rights to something have changed hands. Nothing more, nothing less.
Hey at least then you own a domain name and all of its subdomains and can make them point whatever you want and host whatever you want out of them. When you buy an NFT you own one URL on an image hosting site, whose content you don’t even control.
fair enough, but $12/yr for something I can do whatever I want with vs several grand once for an immutable monkey JPEG that i cannot do anything with except sell to someone else…
I had sudden tinnitus start in my left ear pulsing a high pitch with my heartbeat. Then slowly a crackling started in my right with its volume based on what I'm hearing. Now Im bombarded with noise every moment of every day. Docs have basically said "welp this is your life now". The Antidepressants arent cheap either!
I’ve had tinnitus since I was born, that trick does help, but only for a couple minutes. I just live with at this point, I’ve never had true silence so idk what I’m even missing
Two things helped me: learning not to listen to the “noise” (it’s not truly noise, it’s a kind of nerve damage), and hearing aids. When I first put the aids in the tinnitus vanished. The downside is that all the work I’d put in to not listening was overturned, because I “heard” the sounds again when I took the aids out. Still nice to have that respite though.
Training yourself to not listen to the racket isn’t easy, but it is so worthwhile. Turn your attention away to something else - a smell, a photograph, your pet, anything. Focus away. Just thinking about tinnitus is making it “audible” to me, lol! It’s not real sounds, it’s your poor abused nerve endings firing off random signals. White noise works for a lot of people, but it never has for me.
Visit tinnitus.org for more info. There’s a download section where you can get a pdf of a scientific paper describing the method.
I get that this is tongue in cheek, but seriously, some people are just waiting to die and seem to find joy in tracking how their body is breaking down vs doing something about it.
Body maintenance becomes more and more necessary as you get older. Use it or lose it.
Do strength training on the weakest parts of your body (hips, ankles, knees, shoulder, rotator cuffs, lower back, neck) and you will thank yourself decades later.
To anyone trying to cope with minor permanent tinnitus know it gets better. When I first realized I had it at 23 I pulled neurotic worrying self pity card, a year later and its just another part of life like that weird occasional ache in your back. I dont notice it 90% of the time and put on a fan or yt video the other 10%. There’s a definite psychological toughness factor to it as you go from “oh man I really really really hope this goes away in a month I dont want this the rest of my life to " oh well could be worse better stop with the loud music and excessive drinking/smoking.”
If I ever have kids of my own I’ll make sure to let them know not to blair shit into their ears for years straight and take hearing protection seriously
I thought it was less about racial stereotypes, and more about this big recent push across multiple fields to not have people’s names attached to things. Right now (or recently) it’s about oviducts v Fallopian tubes or the bulbourethral gland v Cowperis gland in biology, which I’m familiar with. I think there was a post and comment thread about birds specifically in the last few days on Lemmy; same thing with people’s names being removed.
From what I’ve seen, a lot of the motivation to not have peoples’ names attached to things is because people have things attached to them (such as racism). Not saying that’s every case, but I’m sure that’s a significant factor behind the general push.
Um. The names aren’t being replaced with other personal names, and even if they were, it’s certainly not with the names of the people doing the replacement.
I think the point was they aren’t necessarily trying to replace names with their own, but they get the privilege to name it whatever they like and the name will be used until the next big wave of renaming things comes along.
It’s really dependent on the attitude of the renamers. Maybe they are honored for the privilege and take it seriously, others might think it’s their god given right to name things and fuck the old names. That last one may be a bit extreme, and without actually knowing these people, the best option is to just not give a fuck and move on with life.
“Libertarian” always seems like a misnomer. Libertarians only want people like themselves to experience liberty. They aim to do nothing to address inequities like social and systemic discrimination against LGBT+ people, BIPOC, women, and others. They aim to do nothing to address poverty. It’s social darwinism at its ugliest. This is why they are practically indistinguishable from conservatives here in the US – the way they arrive may look different, but the outcomes are the same. At best, they are wearing blinders. At worst, they actively support the power structures and systems that result in things like poverty and abuse.
People who legitimately do seek liberty should instead be looking to things like anarchism, which is interested in addressing the root causes of all of these problems, such as hierarchies and the state.
There is equality and there is equity. Libertarians are for equality even if it creates non-equity.
Let me give an abstract example so that it is not politically charged. Suppose that there are green-skinned people in our society that for some historical reason value writing poetry above all else. And they are trying to earn their living by writing poetry and sometimes having second part time usually low paid job to support themselves.
Libertarian would say that these green people has absolute right to do so, and face consequences of their choice. This is liberty.
People who advocate equality would say - no, there is systemic green-ism that leads to green people being consistently underpaid, having less percent of them in high level jobs like CEO, and so on. They then propose all sorts of laws that will treat green people differently so that the average salary, average number of CEOs per 100,000 population and other similar metrics associated with “success” are the same for green people. This kind of differential treatment of green people is absolutely against to liberty minded people, that includes libertarians, that think that the laws should be the same to all people, regardless of their skin color, genetics and so on.
I once had a user whose PC would freeze every time they tried to see their desktop. Like, you minimise something full screen and the PC would freeze for a few minutes and crawl while the desktop was in view.
Turns out they had more than 4,000 items on their desktop.
That day I learned where Windows puts icons that don’t fit on the desktop (it stacks them all on the first icon’s place, lol). And this wasn’t even the problem they called about! They were just grumpily blaming Microsoft and working around it for years.
I guess my point is computer illiterate/belligerent people will find a way around the problems they cause and just blame something/someone else.
A couple in an elegant restaurant in Texas. The waiter appears, dressed in a tailcoat with a bottle wrapped in a napkin: "Chateo de Sauce, 1985" and pours a little into the customer's glass, the customer tastes it and nods. The Waiter leaves and the other couple says "Wow, you were right, really a high-class restaurant."
"I already said it, and this was just the ketchup."
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