I love this, though, because my favorite thing about Superman is he isn’t Batman. I love Batman too, but Superman isn’t a dude who decided to live his life in pursuit of a vendetta against society when he was eight and then just did nothing for the next two decades but get super jacked, become the world’s greatest detective, and memorize every strategy used by every winner in every field of competition in history. Superman is a very good-hearted person who knows how to bale hay, use AP Stylebook, and break meteors into manageable bite-sized pieces by hitting them real hard. And I’m not saying Superman isn’t smart. He’s a bright guy, he’s just not like, one of the celebrated geniuses of the DC Universe. The best thing about Superman is he is basically a normal dude who happens to be orders of magnitude stronger than anyone else. Normal dudes have brain farts. Normal dudes are presented with a life-or-death situation they have less than four seconds to resolve and make a decision that is not optimal. Normal dudes aren’t typically asked to rescue a child from a 10,000 ton machine bearing down on him at 85mph, but if they were, they would probably sometimes panic a little and do dumb shit like ruin a train when they could have just whisked the child to safety.
I think sometimes Superman makes the wrong decision, not necessarily to the result of extreme catastrophe, but something like this, where everyone is standing around clapping and cheering and the kid’s parents are weeping in gratitude and they want to pose for a picture for the 6 o’ clock news with Superman and the conductor, and in the crowd someone is like “Why didn’t he fly the kid out of the way?” and rather than rolling with the fact that the emperor is naked his friend just says “Shut up, Drew, it’s Superman.”
And then, because I also love Batman for very different reasons, I imagine that later on the same day Bruce Wayne gets a phone call and Clark Kent is like “Hey, Wayne, I uh, need a favor.”
“Do you now.”
“Yeah, I, uh, kind of owe the Union Pacific Railroad $60,000.”
“Oh, and why’s that?”
“Come on, don’t do this to me. It was all over the news.”
“I’m prepared to write you a no-strings-attached check for the full amount on the condition that you explain your entire thought process from beginning to end.”
Anyway, that’s why I like Superman.
I think this is very accurate. One time a tree fell on me in the forest and while it would have made more sense to simply jump to the side and avoid it my idiot brain went through the fight-or-flight options and apparently chose fight, so I reached out my hand and caught the tree, then dropped it on the ground beside me. Ended up fracturing my wrist and wondering why the fuck my brain thought that was the best option for survival. I don’t think people are good at really weighing the optimal choices in moments of crisis.
Bruce: “New Justice League policy. I am willing to pay for whatever damages you guys do in the name of justice and saving lives, but you have to write up a report detailing how the damage occured, including your thought process. Every once in a while, I will complie them into a presentation that we will go through as a whole to determine how you could have mitigated the collateral damage.”
Clark: “This is going to be a ‘name and shame’ type of thing, isn’t it?”
Bruce, lying through his teeth: “Of course not, don’t be ridiculous. This is to improve ourselves.”
The ones who admit “I don’t know what happened here” get a pass on shaming but they still get the alternative suggestions list
And on nights when he really needs a break, Bruce pulls those presentations out, watches the video, and laughs his tits off.
Forget the edgy “batman contingency: here’s how I’d kill all my friends” that’s all over YouTube Shorts, THIS is the series I want to see!
IT’S BECAUSE OSHA REGULATIONS! A SINGLE PERSON IS NOT ALLOWED TO LIFT MORE THAN FIFTY POUNDS! BAGGAGE HANDLERS ARE PEOPLE! YOU PAY MORE FOR HEAVY BAGS BECAUSE THE HANDLERS ARE SUPPOSED TO USE THE BUDDY SYSTEM TO LIFT THOSE! IF THE TOTAL WEIGHT MATTERED SO MUCH, PASSENGERS WOULD GET WEIGHED, BUT WE DONT QUESTION THAT NOW DO WE?
It also helps with weight distribution in the cargo hold. If every bag has a max weight they can put them anywhere in the hold and know roughly how evenly spread the load is. If every bag has some arbitrary measurement between, say, 30 and 100lbs, it’s a lot harder to get that done.
This is also why when flights are partially or mostly empty, they encourage people to move up in the cabin. It gives the cabin crew some peace and quiet in the back galley, and helps counterbalance the weight load of the cargo hold.
There are multiple reasons for the per-bag weight-limit, and all of them are safety.
Weight distribution and passenger placement can and has resulted in deadly crashes, particularly when flight crew have been pressured to ignore these limitations of their aircraft.
The most dramatic example I can think of is the 1981 crash at Pushkin Airfield, wherein the soviet navy lost sixteen admirals and generals, a further twelve other high-ranking officers effectively leaving their entire Pacific Fleet leaderless. All fifty people on board were killed within eight seconds of takeoff. It happened so fast that there was no way the highly experienced pilot could have saved the plane.
How could this possibly happen with so many important people on board? Well, it’s because they were so important, they bullied the crew into loading all the luxury goods from their latest shopping spree onto the plane, did not give the crew time to secure some of the more unusual and heavy cargo, and then ignored their seating assignments. If the crew had felt secure enough to deny the demands, this likely would never have happened. Planes need to have a known and carefully balanced weight to safely fly.
I love it when I tell doctors that I’m a LARPer and an endurance hiker and one of the most frustrating things about chronic pain is how hard it is to go to the park and do my favorite physical activites, and they’ll look at me like a dog that’s just been shown a card trick and ask, “Have you tried exercising?”
Brother, you don’t even know how bad I wish we could try exercising rn
Chronic illness patients: so I really like to do [physical activity] but it’s gotten like, physically hard to do lately
Genius doctors: have you tried increasing your physical activity?
“I’m so fucking good at health.”
me: like, i live downtown and it’d be nice to be able to take a short walk to the secondhand bookstore or that local pizza place i like, you know? i used to do that all the time but it hurts too much now
my GP: i’m gonna play devil’s advocate here for a moment; if the medication isn’t helping anymore, have you tried exercising?
me: [slowly consuming myself from the inside because did i not just say with my words that i used to walk around downtown and i haven’t been able to anymore?]
So the thing about oceanography is that people take it thinking that it’s marine biology, which it VERY MUCH IS NOT. Oceanography is basically a combination of geology and meteorology and climatology and chemistry and physics because this world belongs to the oceans and we’re just living in it but the OTHER thing is that every professor who teaches lower division oceanography knows their students signed up because they thought this was a class about how cool fish are and THE THING IS every professor who teaches lower division oceanography ALSO THINKS FISH ARE REALLY FUCKING COOL and wants to talk about it and that’s why, after learning a whole bunch about wave physics and current temperatures and plate tectonics I get to watch three lectures in a row about cool fish are to finish out this class.
This is, for the record, at least my third oceanography class and I have loved every one of them. If you’re in college and you need to take a lower division physical sciences class, oceanography is usually a safe bet because it’s fun and it’s interesting and the professors don’t make you do a lot of math and you get to watch videos of terrifying waves and get radicalized about climate change.
Not kidding about that last thing, btw. I decided this professor is my favorite when one of her lectures diverted into a rant that started with “And it’s bullshit! Bullshit! Exxon knew forty years ago and lied to us” and ended with her talking about direct action.
the “no spoiler culture”, mainly perpetuated by the marvel cinematic universe, that pushes the idea that a story is only worth watching and telling if the audience knows absolutely nothing about it beforehand, has done irreparable damage to storytelling and how an audience interacts with the story. in this essay i will-
The Gimli Glider is one of those stories where every aspect sounds more fake than the last and yet it all actually happened.
-A passenger plane was underloaded with fuel because Canada had just converted to the metric system and everyone supposed to double check their numbers got it wrong. -When the plane ran out of fuel they were too far away to make it to an in-service airport and had to head towards the Gimli military base. Which was shuttered. -They were coming in to fast due to a lack of flaps control and had to perform a series of slips (as shown in the video above) to slow down, basically drifting a giant passenger plane. -As they come down they realized that just because Gimli’s been decommissioned doesn’t mean it’s abandoned because a bunch of people are having drag races on the runway they’re about to need. -Despite everything they managed to land safely and no one was killed or even hurt which is why it’s one of the best air disasters to meme on.
The Wikipedia page on this is fantastic and my favorite line from it is “Flying with all engines out was never expected to occur, so it had never been covered in training.”
Nice
The wiki page has so many great phrases in it. What was one of the first signs of serious trouble?
[T]he cockpit warning system sounded again with the “all engines out”
sound, a sharp “bong” that no one in the cockpit could recall having
heard before.
How did Pearson fly the plane at an appropriate gliding speed?
Making his best guess
What injuries occurred, and how Looney Tunes were they?
As the aircraft’s nose had collapsed onto the ground, its tail was
elevated, so some minor injuries happened when passengers exited the
aircraft via the rear slides, which were not sufficiently long to accommodate the increased height.
How lucky were the passengers to have Pearson and Quintal flying that day?
Several attempts by other crews who were given the same circumstances in a simulator at Vancouver resulted in crashes.
What happened to the plane itself?
The aircraft was temporarily repaired at Gimli, and flew out two days
later to be fully repaired at a maintenance base in Winnipeg. Following
the full repair, the aircraft was returned to service with Air Canada.
Wait, it was put back in service? This happened in 1983, when was it retired?
people get so confused trying to figure out the Lois/Clark/Superman situation that somehow they come to the conclusion that Clark is cheating on Lois with Superman
I mean Lois clearly has nothing to hide, everyone from here to Krypton’s seen Superman fly her with a chaste hand around her waist. but Clark puts an awful lot of effort into making sure no one ever gets a pic of him and Superman together
what is he worried Lois will see
people shake their heads sadly every time Superman visits the Daily Planet and then Clark emerges from a closet disheveled and tucking his shirt back into his pants. but if Lois won’t see it there’s nothing they can do
When Lois finds out she thinks it’s hilarious, and when someone finally tries to ‘break it to her’, she’s all ready.
“Oh, I know.”
“You… know?”
“Neither of them would ever lie to me.”
“So… *gears frantically spinning* this is like some kind of threesome thing?”
“Oh! No, no, no, absolutely not. *Lois pauses and grins the most lascivious grin she can produce* I just… watch.”
Clark gets a lot of very weird looks that day that he can’t understand at all.
@elidyce no, no, no. don’t hide a shit-stirring bruce and chaotic lois in the tags. this is an important addition, too. just gives that finaltouch that’s dearly needed to really complete this, y’know?
ALT
