@spherewolf / spherewolf.tumblr.com
I originally posted this short ghost story on Bluesky back in December. Reposting here because it’s easier to find my own writing when I can tag it.
Summary: 2nd-person perspective short story in which “you” (a trans kid) make friends with a ghost
Content warnings: deadnaming (unintentional), gender dysphoria
whenever i can't picture dinosaurs existing i just humble myself by looking at birds alive today. what the actual fuck is that thing
I liked this post, scrolled for like another minute before I went “SHIT FUCK SHIT” and scrolled back to reblog it
I always reblog this one when I see it on my dash. When someone posts their own art, writing, or music here they are really hoping you will share it.
(Thank you to @realityphobia for requesting this fic!)
“Is journalism a popular career for superheroes?” Ma wondered.
Clark’s super-speed came to a halt, on his knees in the freshly-composted field. “What?”
“Not every superhero can be a princess or a billionaire,” she said. “They’ve got to have day jobs, most of them.” She was sitting on a fence post made out of a thick log, nursing an enormous cup of coffee.
“Not all of them,” Pa said, dropping seeds into soil much slower than his son. “Some of them are aliens.”
Ma and Clark looked at each other.
“Alien aliens,” he clarified.
“Aliens still need groceries,” Ma said.
“Do they?” Pa asked.
“We do,” Clark confirmed.
“I didn’t mean you,” Pa said, but Clark made a noncommittal noise that passively indicated that his father did not get to decide when Clark did and did not count as an alien.
“Those Lanterns get paid, don’t they?” Pa asked.
“You sound very sure of yourself,” Clark said.
“It’s a job,” Pa said. “They’re space cops, answering to an alien government. I heard about it on YouTube.”
“You need to stop watching those videos,” Ma warned.
“The Lantern Corps doesn’t pay,” Clark said.
“Maybe not in Earth money,” Pa said.
“How’re they gonna spend it if it’s not Earth money?” Ma demanded.
“Let’s not have this conversation again,” Clark interrupted, before anyone could say anything about space capitalism.
“Just doesn’t seem right to have unpaid interns as space cops, is all,” Pa said. He turned his seed packet upside-down, but nothing else came out. Clark disappeared with a wake of wind and reappeared with another packet.
“It’s a volunteer position,” Clark said, handing the seeds off to his father, “just like Superman.”
“Superman doesn’t have a boss,” Pa said.
“I don’t think the Lanterns have bosses, necessarily.”
“They oughta unionize,” Pa said. Clark rubbed the bridge of his nose, leaving dirt smudged there.
“There’s gotta be a lot of private detectives in your line of work,” Ma said. “Right? I think that’s what I’d do, if I was being a superhero anyway.” She seemed a little wistful about it.
“I… there’s a couple,” Clark admitted, since it felt vague enough to be safe.
“Any Earth cops?” Pa wondered.
“Oh, that doesn’t seem ethical,” Ma said. “Cops dressing up and getting evidence without a warrant.”
“Ma, none of us have warrants,” Clark said.
“That’s different,” she said. “There aren’t cops, are there?”
“You know I can’t tell you about people’s identities,” Clark said.
Ma gasped. “There are!”
“I never said that.”
“You’d have said if there weren’t!”
“He’s not that kind of cop,” Clark said, giving up on secrecy. “He’s a forensic investigator and he keeps his jobs separate.”
“Hmm.” Ma narrowed her eyes suspiciously but didn’t press the issue.
“Bet there’s bloggers,” Pa said with a knowing nod. “They don’t have to wear pants.”
“I’m not clear on why you think that’s relevant.”
Pa tapped his temple, depositing celery seed into his hair. “Think about it.”
“I think you’ve got the right of it,” Ma said, and Pa looked vindicated. “Not for the right reasons,” she added, and Pa wilted. “That kinda thing’s gotta be more likely than holding down a nine-to-five when you’re fighting robots in long johns.”
“When you say it like that, it sounds like the robots are wearing long johns,” Clark pointed out.
“Do they not?” Ma asked.
“Which YouTubers are in the League?” Pa asked. “Any that I watch?”
“Pa.”
“Is it Leo? I bet it’s Leo.”
“I don’t know who that is.”
“You oughta set up a commune,” Ma decided. “Then you can all be heroes full time, instead of worrying about rent and such,” she said. “Use your powers to be self-sufficient and all.”
“Ma, that's—people can live at the Watchtower, if they want.” Clark felt that this was an important clarification. “No one wants to. It’s not close enough to anything, nothing delivers. Even if it wasn’t so isolated, I don’t think anyone would want to join a commune with each other. Didn’t you burn down your last commune?”
Pa snorted.
“Threatened to,” Ma said. “Not that they wouldn’t have deserved it if I had.”
“I don’t think you should be advocating communal living with your history, is all I’m saying,” Clark said.
“I’m a special case,” she said with a wrinkle of her nose.
“She doesn’t work well with others,” Pa said, leaning on the fence.
“I do, too!” she insisted, threatening to kick him with one of her boots but failing to reach.
“Donna,” Pa began.
“The hell with her, anyway,” Ma said before he could say anything else. “That doesn’t mean anything, no one worked well with Donna. Donna didn’t work. Just wanted to look like she was walking the walk, but when it was her turn to help with the corn, she was busy painting signs. It can’t all be painting signs!”
“Yeah, well,” Pa began.
“It’s still a good idea,” Ma insisted. “Not every commune’s gonna have a Donna.”
“I think they do,” Pa sighed. “There’s always a Donna.”
“I don’t think Bruce is going to want to join the Justice Commune.”
“He’s a billionaire,” Ma said. “You can exclude the one billionaire.”
“Three.” Clark paused. “That I know of.”
Ma scowled over her coffee. “I’m nice about Bruce because I like him,” she warned, “but I don’t like you hanging out with that crowd.”
“At least one of those billionaires is a socialist.”
“Now that just doesn’t make any dang sense.”
“He might be the Donna, actually.” Clark checked his phone. “I need to get home and shower before work.” He swept his parents up in a hug. “Want me to swing by over lunch?”
“We’ve got it handled,” Pa assured him.
“Text me if you need anything,” Clark said, lifting off the ground.
“Have fun at work,” Ma said with a wave, before he took off in earnest and disappeared into the sky. She reached over, and brushed celery seed out of Pa’s hair.
“I bet Leo’s the guy with the bow,” Pa said. “I know he didn’t say that, but I feel like it was implied.”
Im a real boring bitch! A snoozer! A low key homebody!!! I love loneliness AND privately trying to deal with emotional trauma!!!
reblog if you enjoy napping, being cozy, being conked out, snoozing, wrapping up in blankets, sipping a hot drink, catching some z's, hugging a plushie, or otherwise relaxing and resting
i like how this post gets circulated the most around evening. like yes gang settle down! we know when it's bed time!
wall slam..........
"don't go grocery shopping when hungry" doesn't work for me because Not Hungry Me cannot conceive of a universe in which food is needed so she buys like a cup of pomegranate seeds and some fancy cheese and thinks that'll get us through the week.
FUN FACT the scientist who said that made it the fuck up! he's also the same dude who said that if kids made eye contact with the character on food boxes they wanted it more. so now all the cereal mascots/kids mascots look downwards to a child height. but THEY MADE IT UP and it's allllllll bullshit and bad science to the point cornell deleted the fuckin cereal eyes study from the face of the earth and modern research is saying you SHOULD shop when ur hungry because it makes you put more value on food that would give you more nutrition and actually sharpens your ability to feed yourself well
So I think the cereal box guy was Brian Wansink and honestly that tracks. If Wansink thinks we should be grocery shopping when full then we should definitely be doing it when hungry. Bruh is an absolute joke.
THAT'S THE BASTARD
IT'S HIM
imagine being so bad at science that your university forces you to stop
things he also came up with that are BULLSHIT:
also he committed kickstarter fraud in 2018 and is a massive fatphobe who thinks fat people recruit others to become fat by just existing. fuck him lmao
Here's a few articles by Stephanie M. Lee about Wansink's multiple p-hacking scandals. Initially I just found these looking for more information but now I'm also extremely amused by how much she was on this guy's ass for his shitty science.
Очковый, или африканский пингвин (Spheniscus demersus)
African penguin, also known as Cape penguin
April 25 - World Penguin Day
Werewolf with a cane, brought to you by my achey joints
the wii is considered a retro console now.
THE WII IS CONSIDERED A WHAT.
(Such a cozy book by @travisbaldree . I highly suggest it.)
They’re going to the movies
fun fact one of the world champions in pepper-eating contests is a trans woman and she actually faced significant backlash because people somehow thought she had a biological advantage. to eating spicy pepper
update bc i went back and checked: her name is brianna “the chilli queen” skinner and she set a record in 2017 by slamming back 23 carolina reapers consecutively. she only stopped when told to by the referees, and the next year she stepped down out of boredom. queen
Here's a picture of her, by the way
And her super supportive wife
Iconic
“Can One Punch Man beat-”
Yes. Always. Good lord. I never understand why people can turn this into a big serious discussion. Yes, One Punch Man would beat Thanos. He would beat Luke Skywalker, Superman, every single character from Dragon Ball Z, and every ninja from Naruto. He would beat Thor and Wolverine and the Hulk in a tag team match.
Because he plays by different rules. One Punch Man is a PARODY character. His skill set is defined by comedy, not power levels or physical strength. One Punch Man not Superman facing off against an ever-more powerful lineup of villains. He’s the Roadrunner against Wil E. Coyote’s ever more convoluted plans. Deadpool is the only other super hero type character who comes close to living in the same realm of parody, but frankly, Deadpool repeatedly getting the crap beat out of him would be funnier than Deadpool winning, so One Punch Man would win that fight too, even if he can’t actually kill Deadpool in one punch. Because parody.
If I see another Youtube video recommended to me like “Could One Punch Man beat-” really, truly, I do not care.
I saw somebody also make this point once in another great post, I’m paraphrasing from what I remember; how strong is Saitama? However strong he needs to be in order for it to be funny.
The only possible matchups that Saitama might lose are ones where:
1) it’s conceivable that, due to the rules the other character is operating on (as in, whatever rules of comedy govern the other character’s universe), he might not be able to get in one punch.
AND
2) A compelling argument could be made as to whether it would be funnier for Saitama to lose that fight.
Canon example where both came into play: he lost the fight against that one mosquito, because it was tiny, fast, and flying, and because it was hilarious. Rule #1 alone isn’t enough, because if it isn’t funny for him to lose, he’ll find a way to punch through whatever restrictions are preventing him from punching the target.
So “could One Punch Man beat Superman/Thanos/Unicron/the Death Star?” will always go to OPM.
But you could have a compelling debate over “could One Punch Man beat the Animaniacs?”
Could Saitama beat Roger Rabbit
Saitama could beat Roger Rabbit similar to the way he could defeat Deadpool, but he could never beat Bugs Bunny. Bugs Bunny is at the top of the food chain.
No no no, but ROGER RABBIT OPERATES ON THE SAME PRINCIPALS.
Remember when Roger slides out of his handcuff for a joke, then slides it back on and suddenly can’t escape because it wouldn’t be funny?
That sort of implies that it’s less a question of, “is saitama MORE POWERFUL than roger rabbit?” than it is, “Could saitama’s victory be FUNNIER than roger’s?”
At that point, the power is in the hands of whichever character would be the FUNNIEST to come out on top.
And in order to decide that, we would in turn have to decide:
“Which is funnier: a totally jacked man whose single dream in life is to find an opponent who could stand a chance against him finally, finally finding a worthy adversary in a goofy rabbit in a bowtie…
…or a goofy cartoon rabbit getting his absolute ASS handed to him in a gloriously-animated anime smackdown, complete with a killer soundtrack?”
What about the Unbeatable Squirrel Girl?
Ooh, that’s a good one. Saitama can beat anyone in one punch if it’s funny… but Squirrel Girl can defeat any opponent she wants if it’s also funny. I think Squirrel Girl has the edge here primarily because of the ridiculousness of the character.
I second the vote for Squirrel Girl. It would be utterly hilarious if she beat him, but him beating her would just be kind of sad.
Saitama would finally think he has a worthy adversary in Bugs before a single punch knocks Bugs into a suit and a coffin that lands in the ground, instantly buried with a tomb stone and everything. Realizing he’s killed the only true equal he’ll ever have, Saitama would openly weep over the grave while Bugs comes up in a widower outfit to grieve with him.
I think about this post a lot. I think this same argument applies to Alphadream Mario and Luigi btw
((…I have nothing to say here, I just know that a million people would tag me in this if I didn’t get to it first))
