When I First Read This I Asked My Teen-in-the-’60s-age Relative About That Very Issue. Received A Whole

SOMEHOW (via the impeccable gay vibes) you have made this EVEN MORE tragic. I love it and also How Dare You?!

THE FINAL PROBLEM - part 5 of many - For Tonight. part 1 - part 2 - part 3 - part 4.

This is in the Watson's Sketchbook series!

Well, it's not any weirder than the tax dodging art scene IRL XD

Real Reasons Dragons Hoard Gold

Tax evasion scheme

There are no other options

The king's entire army is unable to stop this dragon from taking all the gold

And then the taxman comes along

"Oh no, I would tell you my assets, but they're all in the lair of a dragon. Guess you'll have to mark me as having no money and deserving of a significant tax cut!"

Then the taxman leaves, and what happens?

The King finds a bunch of adventurers and tells them to fight the dragon

And suddenly the dragon- who need i remind is superintelligent, an archmage, strong enough to tear a giant in half and took down an entire nation's military not last month?

"Oh no! I cannot defeat five traumatized weirdos! I am slain! I guess you'd better take all this gold back to the king"

And all is well until next tax season when Oh No! The dragon has "somehow" revived and has taken all the gold again!

Someone needs to expose this, guys. This is why we still have medieval tech after 3000 years- all the funding's vanishing into unlisted dragon accounts.

“Spidey, about before. You know I think you’re the best, right? And not just the superhero stuff. You’re a big brain, too. You should be over there with Reed and Tony, saving our butts.” “Right, like I’m in their league.” “Okay, so let them do their thing. You can go work on a fallback plan.” “Johnny, look at the time. There’s no way I could… possibly… come up with… a fallback plan!” 

(ASM #648)

Ah yes, my new roommate, a private detective who often must disguise himself and remain inconspicuous, will surely enjoy being the most famous man in all of London. Perhaps I shall have the strand post accurate illustrations to go along with the incredibly detailed descriptions. -Watson, after Holmes borrowed his stuff for experiments one too many times

Everyone gives Sherlock Holmes a hard time about being mean about Watson's writing, but honestly imagine you told your roommate "sure, you can write up an account of my work for the newspaper," thinking it would be like, about the murder, but then he publishes it and it's 90% about you, as a person, and it's a huge hit and now everyone in London knows that you hoard newspapers and do cocoaine when you're depressed. Because I think you'd be little miffed too.

Johnny being asked to supress the part of him that's flaming for the sake of a traditional relationship doesn't seem like the healthiest dynamic ever. XD Luckily he later gets to be true to himself by dating a bunch of aliens, each weirder than the last :)

Now Doris, I'm sure Johnny must be THE most frustraiting boyfriend in the universe But you must know that that's not a promise he can morally keep in all circumstances Amazing Spiderman 21

what are your favorite hogan's heroes eps of all time?( i've been trying to come up with my top 10 and realized how many good episodes there are....)

Oooh, good question! I actually think about this quite a bit because these are the episodes I usually go to when I pull out my DVDs (the flipside is that it means there are a lot of amazing episodes I simply do not think about and rarely rewatch).

This list is roughly in order, though I'm sure there'd be some rearranging if you were to ask me again in a couple of weeks. "Klink vs. the Gonculator" will always remain number 1, though.

"Klink vs. the Gonculator"

"The Swing Shift"

"One in Every Crowd"

"How to Catch a Papa Bear"

"An Evening of Generals"

"Diamonds in the Rough"

"Color the Luftwaffe Red"

"Hogan, Go Home"

"Nights in Shining Armor"

"Man's Best Friend is Not His Dog"

With a special shout-out to the first five minutes of "That's No Lady, That's My Spy" (but ONLY the first five minutes).

This great news about a great fic! Making art more download friendly is a boon to those who, like me, hoard fanworks like a dragon hoards gems.

Turnabout Dishwasher news (it's not really news, but whatever)

not that this will affect too many people, but I found a way to PDF my text box fics without the PDFs looking like garbage and removing formatting. It sort of works on mobile, but generally this is for people who need to download my fics and read them outside of AO3. And if AO3 or my image hosting site ever goes down, this would be the best way to read it.

I'm going to be making a neocities landing page for all my fic PDFs in the near future, so stay tuned for that. In the meantime, I will be re-linking and updating this link on AO3.

This will be where my PDFs will live for now

Shows what I know, I'd barely even heard of this Kent dude (Gothamites' reputations for being a little too focused on our own backyard isn't all that exaggerated, I guess), but I've for sure heard of Lois Lane. You're right, her and her husband have some really great articles.

I especially liked her 'Superheroes, hold the Superpowers: ordinary people hitting in the big leagues' write up. I've always figured our own heroes were a pack of metas, but she makes a compelling case that the Bats might be using gadgets and gizmos. If you're uncomfortable speculating on IDs I'd love to hear your thoughts on how they're pulling off league-level fighting sans powers (Nightwing at least has to have some sort of gravity shift, right?). Either way thanks for the answer :D

Love the blog, just wondering what your take is on the 'Superman has a secret identity' theory that makes headlines every so often when the tabloids run out of other stories? Usually with their fave celeb as the culprit. I usually find that part in bad taste. Everyone has a right to privacy, what if a supervillain actually believes that hogwash, etc. Although as for the latest one it was great that Mr. Wane ran with it and wore blue for a week to raise money for disaster relief. If nothing else his now-viral remarks to Luthor about how 'if he was superman, your buildings would have been redesigned via accidental super fight collateral damage a decade ago, my god man hire a better architect' made for satisfying watching for LexCorp's many critics.

Luthor's the most outspoken disbeliever of that theory, maintaining that the most powerful 'man' in the world, with his own known private hideout in the Arctic, would have no reason to run around pretending to be a normal human. Bruce Wayne might be kind of a dim bulb, but he had a point when he told whatever poor sod from the Daily Planet was covering the Metropolis Spring Gala that Superman seems too personable (at least from interviews and eyewitness accounts) to be anything other than 'just some guy.'

So on the spectrum between the two billionaires what's your take? Does the Man of Steel walk amongst us? If he does, who would he even be when he's not wearing the cape?

Without even having to THINK about it very hard I would come down on Wayne's side in this particular debate just because I don't trust Lex Luthor as far as I could throw him and I have a MUCH higher opinion of Bruce Wayne as, I can imagine, does anyone with some combination of a heart, soul or a brain. As far as the hypothesis goes, it's pretty much confirmed by the Man of Steel himself. He's given multiple interviews where he has shared the outline of his origins and while most people focus on the fact that he's the last son of the lost planet Krypton what he does also say in those interviews is that he was discovered by a human couple and raised as their own in the manner of a normal human child. Now of course he has never shared ANY particular details about his 'foster parents' because any stray detail could be traced back to them but that pretty much seals the deal doesn't it? If he was raised by humans, one would imagine that he went to school, had dreams, wanted a job and a house and a social life and all those things that human beings get used to having and wanting. Anytime we don't see him directly in action we have to imagine it's because he's out there...doing whatever it is he does during the day! That being said I don't think I can, nor will I, speculate as to who or what he might be in that life behind the scenes. It's none of my business, it is none of the WORLD'S business and nothing good could ever come from finding out. What I will say is that I do not believe for a SECOND the most tired and well trodden theory on the subject.

(Bruce Wayne meeting with Daily Planet reporter Clark Kent) Daily Planet reporter Clark Kent is NOT Superman, people come on! It just doesn't add up to the facts. Clark Kent had a totally average childhood, more or less. He was born in the small hamlet of Smallville, Kansas to Jonathan and Martha Kent which is disproving enough in and of itself. Superman has stated he was obviously a foster child. Clark Kent is, by all records, his parents' biological child. There are records of his attendance of school, vaccination records, his journalism diploma, the whole nine yards. There are two main reasons this story remains so popular. In Superman's orbit he is the one who most resembles Superman...in that he is a dark haired white guy with blue eyes and a strong chin. Analysis on his posture and his gait have shown that he doesn't move or articulate like Superman as you would know if you have ever watched the man on television, read or listened to his writing or just been aware of him as a public figure in Metropolis for YEARS. I still get the Planet here in New York just because him and his wife are some of the best journalists I've ever read. And in that is the other reason, his wife, the world renowned Lois Lane who in the early years of Superman's career had a public infatuation and casual romance with the Man of Steel. Many people got very attached to this public love affair and have never quite forgiven Lane for her public "break up" with Superman in the aftermath of her engagement to Clark Kent. This is just real people shipping for all its nonsense, Kent doesn't have to be Superman for Lane to have married him. Lane and Kent have been partners in crime for basically Kent's entire career and maybe Lane just decided she loved Kent more strongly, or that Superman was unattainable, or any one of ten billion other reasons that don't have shit to do with me or anyone else. Kent and Lane's marriage has also put the inevitable final coffin in the theory with the birth of their son Jonathan who by all accounts is exactly as human as his father. Ignoring all the times and in all the ways that Superman and Kent have been filmed or photographed in the same place because Superman and Kent have been close friends for a very long time because Superman is publically very close with a large group of the Daily Planet's staff ever since his first appearance in Metropolis. Bottom line, yes, I believe that Superman spends his 'nights' as a normal human somewhere on this big blue marble. But his only distinguishing features are that he's a white man with dark hair and strong shoulders. He could hide that with a big enough coat.

Re-blogging not just for the hot take, but also for that terrible (wonderful) pun

I'm totally stealing 'literary hurts' to substitute for 'literally hurts' when it comes to classic literature fuckery

I keep forgetting how absolutely cringe Fitzwilliam Darcy is before his first proposal...🤣

The guy was so clueless it literary hurts

Hey I think I can help! My dad is from Rural America and My mom is a Fancy Lady from the Big City (it was a real scandal) so my sib and I are oddly bilingual in one language. In certain rural dialects "Old Man" (especially with a possessive adjective i.e. 'mine' 'her' 'your') is used to mean specifically a patriarch of the family to which a person belongs (which can be father or husband, as you said, but can apply to grandparents, stepparents, or other male relatives that fill that role) as in "my old man won't let me out tonight, but you best believe I'm goin' anyhow." It has a level of exasperated affection; there are many old men, but (for better or worse) this one is mine. ALTERNATELY, especially in the city, it can be a derisive description when used about a stranger; an old man is no one of import, or someone to be regarded with scorn. The first and most important trait you notice about him is that he is past his prime. "Sorry I'm late, some old man ahead of me in line was shouting at the barista." This makes it an extremely interesting phrase because if you use it on someone you know but have an undefined relationship with it is either a term of familial endearment or a dismissive insult.

(When it comes to writing Batfam, this has almost as much utility as the belts XD)

edit: whoops just realized somebody already answered this really well, my bad, I gotta learn to read those replies

Okay, can anyone explain the nuances of 'Old Man' to me?

Like, it's a way of teasing someone about ageing and the passage of time. It's both a slang for 'dad' AND 'boyfriend/husband.' It MIGHT be a way of referring to other authority figures??

I just ... I'm trying to sort out references used by the various Bats.

Dick and Damian use it for Bruce.

Bruce uses it for Alfred.

Are they alluding to the parental role these guys have? (Damian definitely is.) Just teasing them about ageing?

I'm pretty sure a 'my' in the front firmly drops it into dad territory. But how about a definite article? No article at all?

I didn't grow up with this phrase, and it is challenging me!