Yeah I Feel Alexandria Would Probably Win If Only Because She Actually Knows How To Fight And Has The

hey really cool theory, to build on it using a point from I think @artbyblastweave edit: sorry it was @estavionpira

Etienne is always in control, his original plan with Valentina is for the two of them to rule, afterwards it’s for him to be one of the people who “really” matter, when Heavy gets shot Etienne is in a very convenient king maker position, and so on,

Now it’s not clear if Etienne does this on purpose or if it’s just a happy accident that he keeps being in power but if your idea is right and the Queen really would’ve succeeded, then maybe Etienne realized and wanted to make sure that didn’t happen to not disrupt his own power

Of course that does kinda make the whole thing a little boring if it was just “Etienne is a power hungry dickhead” but still thought its interesting

There is something about this page...

I think we're going to find out that the "Queen" did not 'choose' to enter a bad trip, and that she was pushed towards it through some type of manipulation.

The first panel looks like she received some type of relay, especially if you take into consideration the little splotch of white against the ink black backdrop, right along where the eye meets temple. It looks almost like a bloodstain. Did she get shot with a psychic bullet that gave her an invisible lobotomy? That caused her to have a personality shift in the following third panel?

My first instinct is to lay the blame at Etienne's feet. We know he has mental powers, she looks to be suffering some kind of psychic damage, and he was suspiciously... absent... in this issue. He appears in three panels, only speaks in two. What he says is that "if they have the chance (to kill her) they should, because she's an unknown variable".

I think that this "Queen" could have achieved her goal. I think she could have made Heaven on Earth. And Etienne gamed the risks out in his head and calculated that there was a slight chance she could go nuclear down the line and cause the end of the world, so he sets her off early and - while the entire continent of Europe is lost - it's an acceptable loss compared to the entire planet they would have lost had she been allowed to continue her mission and, somewhere along the line, she goes berserk.

We already know he is the type of person to kill one victim instead of four when faced with the trolley problem. An acceptable sacrifice.

HOWEVER

I also have this nagging suspicion about the "Queen's" origins, and it has something to do with this panel -

"...I was asleep through the whole thing."

ASLEEP?!?!

If Masumi was in Japan the same time Isabella was, then we know that the "Queen's" shift happened in the day. She blocked out the sun with her display of power. Not to say that Masumi has an average sleeping schedule, but on its face the excuse just makes no sense. If the "Queen" really was tearing reality apart, I don't see how the resolution of this conflict would take longer than a few minutes, maybe a few hours at best (unless we see something involving the Pyramid slowing the "Queen" in the next issue).

So what if Masumi was in a different kind of 'sleep'?

We know that when Masumi feels intense despair, a kaiju rises up to destroy things. This has happened before. However, in her appearances she hasn't really had great leaps of emotion in any other direction, like intense anger or intense happiness.

What if she can manifest different creatures based on how she's feeling, and this "Queen" was actually a 'kaiju' representation of her ecstasy? Or what if this was her original power, and something happened that made it flip and only be activated by despair? Did someone interfere? Etienne?

I want to draw some attention to a panel from a previous issue that was about Masumi, at her gallery debut. Look at her eyes.

Familiar, right?

Even the backgrounds are similar.

And thinking about how the Power Fantasy is a pastiche of super heroes but especially X-Men, mutants, and their dynamics. Etienne is Professor X, Heavy is Magneto, etc.

I, at first, assumed Valentina was the Jean Grey. The Omega with godlike powers, much like the Phoenix.

However, the Phoenix has had a storied history throughout the Marvel Universe, as a bringer of life and of destruction.

So what if Masumi was the Jean Grey of Power Fantasy? And the evolution of her power is that ANY intense feeling causes some type of psychic creature to appear?

And she was 'asleep' throughout the Second Summer of Love because she was channeling the "Queen" in Manchester? And something happened to her which then affected the "Queen", turning her into a threat? What if this was Etienne's doing?

This is all conjecture, but conjecture is all I have right now while trying to fill in the missing gaps of 'The Second Summer of Love' that have yet to be provided using the clues available to me.

We know Val was there, and she was not just an acolyte of the "Queen" but also in love with her. Heavy was busy with his kid but he showed his support of this growing movement for love, sex, and drugs. Magus wanted her gone, but he also sacrificed a LOT of his own people to stop her and it hit him HARD he wanted her out before she became a threat. Eliza sold her soul to take the "Queen" down.

That just leaves Etienne and Masumi. What were they really doing during the 'Second Summer of Love'?

today we post everett true

i actually do kinda like delivering groceries on the side because it gives me such a unique cross-section of the community. i never know whose groceries im shopping for until i finish the delivery and see them/their home and it's like it adds more detail to the picture of who they are. the baby supplies going to the apartment that i know for a fact is one bedroom (they'll be moving soon - i bet they're apartment hunting, i hope they find a place). the new cat litter box, bowl, and kitten food going to the house covered in "i <3 my dog" paraphernalia (a kitten definitely showed up on the porch recently and made itself at home). the fairly healthy boring grocery order that includes an incongruous tub of candy-filled ice cream going to the home of an elderly woman with toddler toys in the yard (it's clearly for her grandkids, whom she sees often).

shopping for someone else's groceries is a fairly intimate thing. i've bought condoms and pregnancy tests, allergy medicine and nyquil, baby benadryl and teething gel, a huge pile of veggies paired with an equally huge pile of junk food, tampons and shampoo and closet organizers and ant traps and deodorizing shoe inserts and a million other little things that tell a million different stories in their endless combinations. one time someone had me buy one single green bean. i messaged them to confirm that's actually what they wanted, and they said yes - neither of them liked green beans very much, but they had a baby they were introducing to solid foods, and they wanted to let him try one to see if he liked them. another time i had someone request 50 fresh roma tomatoes - not for a restaurant, but for a person in an apartment. the kitchen behind them smelled like basil and garlic when they opened the door. another time i brought groceries to three elderly blind women who share a house. that was one of the few times i have ever broken my rule and gone inside a place i've delivered to, because they asked if i could place the grocery bags in a specific location in the kitchen for them to work on unloading and there was no way i was going to refuse helping.

i gripe about the poor tippers, but people can also be incredibly kind. one time i took shelter from a sudden vicious hailstorm inside an older lady's home in a trailer park, while i was in the middle of delivering her groceries. we both huddled just inside the door, watching in shock as golf-ball-sized hail swept through for about five minutes and then disappeared. she handed me an extra $10 bill on my way out the door.

when covid was at its deadliest, people would leave extra (often lysol-scented) cash tips and thank-you notes for me taped to the door or partially under the mat. i especially loved the clearly kid-drawn thank you notes with marker renderings of blobby people in masks, or trees, or rainbows. in summer of 2020 i delivered to a nice older couple who lived outside of town in the hills, and they insisted i take a huge double handful of extra disposable gloves and masks to wear while shopping - those were hard to find in stores at the time, but they wanted me to have some of their supply and wouldn't take no for an answer.

anyway. all this to say people are mostly good, or at least trying to be, despite my complaints.

Also it sounds like sci-fi but one day (possibly very long one day) with genetic technology even extinct creatures may eventually be brought back.

The Day the Dinosaurs Died

A young paleontologist may have discovered a record of the most significant event in the history of life on Earth.

hey, @bunjywunjy - this might be your jam (and any other dinosaur enthusiasts, it’s a heck of a read)

So i watched jungle cruise and since then I’ve been wondering, what would the curse have done to Frank if he had been trapped? I was thinking maybe big cats but that isn’t something you can really dissolve into unlike the others so maybe quicksand, though that’s sorta like the frog/mud guy. So maybe water with fish or something. What do you think?

http://chng.it/2TrMRPgFjS

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STOP ICE FROM POISONING IMMIGRANTS!

Help stop the gassing of Immigrants!!

Reupload from twitter and ao3

Possibly the first time I drew Cody and the clones in a doodle....then somehow blew up into an eye-searingly pastel colored comic.

I think I intended this to be Scariff’s beach, but yeah, I suppose this is now whatever planet with beaches and agressively touchy-feely gigantic locals

For your first part we hear from Crusader that she supposedly triggered after being trapped in a crashed truck for days slowly starving until she triggered to eat light and get the truck off

Thinking about Purity

I have two thoughts on Purity. Here they are:

One. Her trigger event consisted of her being trapped in a lethal environment with no resources, gradually going insane, and developing overwhelming firepower in order to fight off a horde of assailants who didn’t actually exist. I can’t imagine what that’s a metaphor for. Haven’t the foggiest.

Two.  Purity is interesting, from a worldbuilding perspective, because at the start of the story there’s an actual niche archetype from the comics that she’s fulfilling.

 “Hardcore street-level hero who actually turns out to be a racist lunatic that the actual heroes need to take down” isn’t quite a chestnut at the big two but it’s a story beat I’ve seen multiple times; Nightwing vs his building’s insane janitor in Dixon’s run, Captain America vs Jack Monroe and to a lesser extent USAgent, I feel like Batman’s deal with Lock-up from the animated series inches towards this, although that one wasn’t explicitly racialized. Punisher’s done this a couple times, It’s Peacemaker’s whole bit, there’s definitely a few more I’m forgetting.

So the subversive element here isn’t that she’s an openly racist superhero; it’d that she’s still allowed to be a racist superhero. It’s that a thematically appropriate hero like Legend hasn’t come to town specifically to drop the hammer on her for daring to be an openly racist superhero. 

 And to be charitable, what’s usually going on in those other stories is that the racist heroes are almost always explicitly bad knockoffs of the protagonist. They’re intended as a dark mirror, because the obvious failure mode of heroic vigilantism is that it’s extremely appealing to racists, glory hounds, egomaniacs and egomaniacal racist glory hounds, but the flip side of that is that people with those characteristics go down like chumps in a fight with a true-blue hero. They exist in the story as a one-off warning for the real heroes, who give them a chance and then chuck them in the bin when they show their true colors.

Worm, though, doesn’t have a just-so structure. The racist idiots who get superpowers and develop delusions of heroism don’t provide the courtesy of also being weak and incompetent enough that the “real” heroes can root them out with minimal fuss. Purity won the goddamn power lottery; she’s one of the most powerful capes in the Bay, with hit-and-run capabilities that all of the heroes working together are textually incapable of countering. (And this isn’t like The Boys where they’re all secretly in bed with each other- New Wave has serious beef with the Empire! They would absolutely pin her ass to the wall if the opportunity arose, but they can’t!)

So in a very real sense, The Protectorate is pussyfooting around her, letting her exist in the gray zone of self-deluded vigilantism, because…. well, the second she can’t sustain her self-deception anymore, the second someone really pushes, her go-to reaction is to commit a mass casualty event. She was always a time bomb, and so the strategy of just continuing to label her as a villain, while she continuously hopefully refreshes PHO to see if any helpful fans have updated her wiki page yet, is, you know, I get it. It’s not great but I get it. A hands on approach only works if you can actually lay hands on them.

But! As far as I can remember, she was functionally operating as an Independent Hero as the setting defines it! Everyone in power pretends she isn’t but she was still in that ballpark, hand in hand with how selectively racist she was being about it! She was a vigilante, she was out to target “criminals” and clean up the streets using her powers, she had a costume and a secret identity- actually one of the few capes we see in Brockton Bay with a full-time day job- and she was really really really racist.

So with Purity, Worm is being honest about the inability of a superhero community to clean house, to effectively police who gets to be a part of it, who gets to actively consider themselves a part of it. There was never going to be a righteous beat-down where she gets “kicked out” of the fraternity, no “you are not affiliated with me” moment that finally gets through, even though many heroes in the setting would dearly love to deliver such a thing. A certain level of power purchases the right to think of yourself in whatever terms you want, and the heroes just have to stand around looking uncomfortable and swearing up and down that, no, her vigilantism is different from good vigilantism, honest, completely different underlying models.

Okay I’m currently furious that migraines are often so blindly easy to treat and I had to find this out myself at the age of 26 when I’ve been to a neurologist since I was 11 lol so I’m about to teach you two neat and fast little tricks to deal with pain!

The first is the sternocleidomastoid muscle, or the SCM muscle.

This big red section is responsible for pain around the eye, cheekbone, and jaw, as well as some temple pain. Literally all you have to do is angle your head down a little, angle it away from the side that hurts, and then you can gently pinch and rub that muscle. I find it best to start at the bottom and travel upwards. The relief is so immediate! You can increase pressure as you feel comfortable doing so.

Here is a short and easy video showing this in action

The second is a fast and easy stretch that soothes your vagus nerve, which is the nerve responsible for calming you down. The vagus nerve, for those unfamiliar, is stimulated by deep breathing such as yawning, sighing, singing, or taking a deep breath to calm your anger in a tense situation.

You can stretch this out by sitting up as straight as possible (this does not have to be perfect to work) and interlacing your fingers. Put your hands on the back of your head with your thumbs going down the sides of your neck and, while keeping your face forward, look all the way to one side with just your eyes. Hold that until you feel the urge to breathe deeply or yawn, or until you can tell there’s a change. Then do the same thing on the other side. When you put your arms down, you should clearly be able to turn your head farther in both directions. If the first session doesn’t get rid of your migraine, rest and repeat as many times as necessary. I even get a little fancy with it and roll my eyes up and down along the outer edge sometimes to stretch as much as I can.

If you need a visual here’s a good video on it. I know some of the language they use seems questionable but this is real and simple science and should not be discarded because it’s been adopted by the trendy wellness crowd!

I seriously cannot believe I didn’t hear a word of this from any doctor in my life. Additionally, if you get frequent recurring migraines, you may want to see a dietician. Migraines can be caused by foods containing histamines, lectin, etc. and can also be caused by high blood pressure in specific situations such as exercise, stress, and even sex.

If any of this information helps you I’d love to hear it btw! It’s so so fast and easy to do. Good luck!